A Blue Sneaker

A single blue sneaker lay in the street. We spied it soon after we turned the corner onto 88th Street and Amsterdam. It was parked between the curb and a car tire.  Like the sedan, it was forsaken at a sharp angle. Unlike the automobile, it was not purposefully placed there. It looked like a relative of single sneaker, sucked off the foot of a victim, at the scene of a hit-and- run I had seen on the news clip last evening. It looked just like the sneaker someone had run out of, escaping a mass shooting a few weeks ago.  Or the odd ash-covered sneaker that survived the fall of the World Trade Towers.

  

I cleared the hoary thoughts from my head. The sneaker had a story, but it was probably an accidental and innocuous one. A student might have overstuffed an unzipped backpack, and one gym shoe toppled onto the sidewalk, then rolled into the street. Maybe a mischievous teen threw his friend’s sneaker into the street. Then and they both ran after each other, laughing down the street, the sneaker forgotten and the pursuit paramount. Perhaps the owner of the car might come back tomorrow to move the car for alternate side of the street parking. As he moves around the car, he might notice that his sneaker had escaped while he was unloading groceries from the trunk the night before.  Sneaker recovered!  If not, a not so happy ending. The lost sneaker will be brushed into innards of the street sweeper truck and disgorged in the city dump’s sneaker burial ground. And there we are. Another New York sneaker story.

Marsha H.

Sept 17, 2019