notes on crutches
Tracey Slaughter
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2026 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
Three days after the accident, I'm still in the dress I fell in. I don't write.
At night the crutches rest beside my bed, a little crucifixion.
//
When I was a little girl, I would have at least dolled one of them up—taped a sun-frock or a T-shirt onto its adjustable stem, tied a veil or a ponytail ribbon or a cap to the plastic bicep-clasp, to stand for a head on a life-size friend, a twin I could stagger around the lounge with, play-act off the end of its one stiff hand.
//
There is no point to giving it a number on a scale. Pain is back. Pain is here.
And you measure it stick by stick.
//
It is my oldest son who carries me, back and forth, through A & E. It's a packed night shift and they've run out of wheelchairs.
We do our best to laugh at the bumpy spectacle of us, slotting into blue seats in the waiting room.
He does not ask what will happen to the pain now, if it will travel, chronic, take my leg too. We watch the TV, ceiling-bolted and soundless, where a man sells a transformer ladder. We watch its skeleton flipped by his hands, rock solid, through a million lockable clicks.
Then he carries me to radiology, where they're out of wheelchairs too.
There is never enough stock to fit all the people hurt.
//
The leg that dangles alone doesn't know what happened. How did it wake in a black cage? Why did it crash through itself?
It was once a column. It was once a tower. It sends pain up and down, looking for those blueprints.
//
But write it, write it, my lover tells me. I watch his on-screen musculature as he talks. He likes to pit his strength against obstacles: waves, chosen extremes, black ranges. He likes to work out in gyms where the walls report pain is just weakness leaving the body—one logo fits all lycra triumphs. He's just signed up for another marathon hurt, on a corporate-sponsored ticket. He FaceTimes, long-distance, on a heroic pitstop. Write it, his voice says, in pixels, write it. His advice is shining with bulletproof health.
I hold one stick to my face while he's talking: a cold microphone I don't speak into.
//
Or maybe, as a kid, I would have swung one up, trained it parallel by the handle. Pretended to rack it. Swivelled the forearm clip, stared straight down its cool metal scope.
//
Pain is the body leaving and leaving. It tries to leave harder and harder at night. The door is very open at two AM.
I have two sticks to hold the leaving back.
//
At 51, with chronic pain, it's quite a trick—that I must learn to carry myself.
I put two stakes in the ground, because there's no one to rock me.
//
But is there anything sillier than a mammal alone, suspending itself on sticks? Oh the maximalist clattering of it, a skinny slapstick jig, side-splitting. Up and stupidly down I limbo through my house, all metallic hilarity. Cue laughter at the canned tragedy of my walk, each pseudo-step a breakup with gravity.
My body is a joke cracked when no one else is watching.
//
There is a website called Bonesurgeon that says crutches are a hallmark of the adventurous, from falling out of trees to the consequence of a luxurious skiing accident.
Not me. I was just writing. Then I got up from the table and plummeted.
//
Have you injured this leg before? The woman in radiology asks me. She calls it out from the white stall where she retreats after she's lined up the shots—twisted the thing that was my leg on the gurney, fronted it twitching on plates, crosshairs combing its strange empurpled surfaces until her light has a lock.
And hold, she says. And hold again. But my leg is not taking instructions. Ripples are running down, off the hook, from my hip, and my sorries don't make them stop.
In the end, she gets enough on the screen to answer her own question. Yeah you have, she says, nodding. You've hurt this leg before.
She centres a little red bull's-eye sticker on my form before she sends me back to the waiting room.
//
What was I writing when I had the accident?
How once, blind drunk, I lay in a ditch and was raped. When I woke up, one shoe was gone.
How it was a long pissed way to scrape back to the party. Lamed. One-hoofed. Through thorn, through stone.
How for thirty years I would not call it rape. I blacked it out. I could not carry it.
//
Load the weight on my arms of what would otherwise be a fall. And a fall. And angle from room to room like that, almost under into almost over. A wishbone progress, spearing away descent.
Stemming off the underworld with two sticks.
//
I remember watching a magician lock a long-ago woman inside a box. A school trip, I think, but all I remember is a jet-black room, a rhinestone horizon. The woman wore the criss-crossed kind of tights my mother said were only for whores, which maybe I thought was the reason he put her in the box. She lay down with wide platinum curtsies, dramatically. He waved his razors in long steel sheets that quaked with the sound of side-to-side air. Then he sliced her in squares by sliding them fast down slots in her cheap sarcophagus. There was no serration—they dropped through her body in swishing sequence, three clean guillotines. I went very still between my pigtails. The curtains on the velvet theatre pushed against my pin-quiet breath. He wheeled her quartered body apart, into separate oily cubes. Her smile kept wiggling down one end. We were supposed to applaud, give giggles. But far far away her whore toes quivered in their netting, like two spotlit fish.
//
I was expecting my lover the night I broke it. All day, up between my legs, a precursor of fire.
Then he called to say his wife had changed plans.
So didn't I sign on for this?
Crutch is as crutch does.
//
They call it a moon boot, but I'm the thing orbiting. The boot is a planet, and pain is its atmosphere.
The shock of the accident, sealed inside, replays all night, still softly imploding. The nerves unfolding a debris trail. A black hole into bone.
//
In the dogged drag of me up and down, days are counting themselves off—but I don't know what for. What does this thing between my sticks stand for, unshod, one-legged, rancid personage? The stink of me pushed down into sheets, a matted record, the pillow I've mashed round the injury, all the stale layers of it, needed—for what?
I try, but some nights, lying here, I can't think of a why to knit me.
//
This is the ACC hold music I listen to, hour after hour, while I try to qualify for any help: once we were dead now I guess we are angels/ cos we've passed through the dark and eluded the dangers...
I'm prone to sending down the phone a special kind of dismembered laughter.
Before I plead when a human voice picks up.
//
Saddled with myself, between two poles, I can see why old ladies let their skulls be clipped—the ordeal just to launder sweat-coated hair, its odorous lengths that dangle with you, like ribbons of nasty gravity trailing from the scalp. I'm so many days gone the grease has turned to dust, yields moons under irritant fingernails. I wear it around, claw-clipped, leaching into my thoughts, hair bridled everywhichway, last rotting flutter of my mother's long-ago vanity.
//
When I wake at night, my teeth feel cobwebbed, my pulse trying to flesh out a ghost. If I didn't have to piss, I wouldn't waste energy righting myself—only the threat of a urine-gushed bed makes me bother to unlock a muscle.
//
My voice takes routes that break, double back, collapse. There is no getting through this system. An error's been made on my A & E form, a number missing from the code—the physician skipped a digit. Therefore my claim cannot be processed. Therefore I don't qualify for taxi support. Therefore I don't qualify for mobility equipment. Therefore I don't qualify for home assistance. Therefore what I must do is go back into the clinic, to get my code confirmed. I try to explain that there's no one to take me, I'm trying to get a taxi so I can get there, get seen. I'm trying to get in front of the pain, stop it rising. I try to say chronic, ongoing, long story. I'm trying to get a trolley so I can withstand the crutches, so they don't spike the syndrome, inflame my hands, my neck, my whole spine. But the woman on the other end of the call is immovable, follows her script to the automated click.
//
They speak, my sticks, they leave Morse taps. They stamp a pattering rubber-stoppered code around my kitchen floor. I remember being a Girl Guide, ticking off tasks for my semaphore badge, out on camp where we stood around hills, pine-needled, our sticks tipped with red-gold flags, stiff arms swinging a long-distance secret. Then later that night, unsupervised, we stuck long branches down into the campfire and when they lit we spun them in circles, wiping a halo of sparks through the black around our hair. We all did it—a pattern of pivoting, all drunk on the incandescent scrape we left after us. But it was me whose stick tossed embers, that whipped across the gathering to brand another girl. One second I was spinning in my own incendiary daze, the next it had spattered through the circle, and splashed against the throat of someone else.
Her skin disintegrated in a long stick of scar.
//
How many days before the accident did I turn the Tarot card?—the one where the child on crutches is lurching, with a crone in rags, from the shine of a church.
Not enough.
The busted leg on the card, in its frozen bandages, is the right one too.
The snow beneath is bleached to a lake of stained glass.
//
I remember the house I was visiting, when I first read a plastic-coated Footprints, a poster taped to the back of a friend's bathroom door. Little kid memory: bare-assed on porcelain, totally fooled by that poem into buying god's love, his big cloudy cradling hands.
That was when I carried you.
The print of my last good foot drags the empty hallway, burning.
//
I don't think I can stand the pain, I say, face-up, on my back, in the dark.
Nothing in the dark is listening. Except my body—which picks up that word stand.
//
I don't know what the automated message on the ACC taxi number is supposed to say, but what I hear when I ring is:
Please note, your call is being recorded for atrophy purposes.
//
I dream I'm closed in an upright casket. It's on wheels and I'm dragging it around. There's a screen for my face, like confessional mesh, and I'm at the races. Staring out at the betting booths through the breathing space cut into mahogany. My body is bony and banging the bevelled sides as I grind around the grounds. There are tickets all over the asphalt. This is the track where my father used to take me on his weekends, and when I was a kid I would leap down and collect the littered stubs, all the flashy odds that people tore up when they lost. I loved the multi-coloured stink of them, scuffed to confetti by race-day footprints: I stashed whole palmfuls of scrapped hope to steal home with me when my father dropped me off. But in the dream I can't bend down, all I can do is hear them sticking in the wheelbase, soft bits of trash that make navigating difficult. I push through the crowd but no one seems to notice I'm clamped inside a coffin.
When I wake it's obvious: the box is like a cross between the crutches and the mobility trolley. But the races?
Then I remember: every time my father took me there'd be an animal that broke its leg. In between races, a vast railed drape was maneuvered over turf to shroud the downed horse.
Up through the stands the crack would echo out as it was shot.
//
After nine months of not bleeding, the fall knocks one last cycle out of me. Epic and messy, a flood I don't need, trailing back and forth on my sticks to staunch it. I joke that in the wild, this busted, I'd be dead—so maybe it's primal, my menopausal body trying to send a sign it still has some use left. Mark it in red, a message for the tribe—don't cut me adrift, don't leave me in the dark woods.
But it doesn't feel like much of a joke.
//
This thing shivering over the sink is your mistress, this pale propped-up wretch, stripped naked but for boot, scratching a sponge at her wasted flanks.
I hope she didn't interrupt your race.
//
Yes, I have hurt this foot before.
I am biking home from a music lesson when my bare foot skids, drives into the spokes. There is a sound that is butchery, but I yank it back and keep on pedalling. Then I look down and the ball of my foot is a hinge of meat, white-red and flapping.
I crash, in a shower of sheet music staves. There's a boy I love who is riding behind me—top-gear, he plunges into hero mode, races for help.
In a couple of nights, he takes me, bandaged, braced, to our local cinema. In the sweep of the love scene I think he will kiss me. My nerves violin—I prepare to lean in, open-mouthed.
Instead, there's the clattering down of my propped-up crutches.
//
Bonesurgeon says, on the plus side, they are ideal for poking people to gain attention.
//
Why does every fucking clinic hold seven circles of swing fucking doors? Oh sure, book me another date with high-polished linoleum and hydraulic exits.
//
I'm bad on crutches, can't perfect their double-jointed timing, hitch myself around my old world with their splinted lurch. Me and two metal sticks make a rickety trinity—and oh that sudden hi-hat splash when a heel catches, demi-trip, scuffle, yelp, jerk. Every muscle is screaming to keep me perpendicular, a hellbent ball-and-socket need. The rhythm of my clamberings scores the corridors: thud, scrape, despair, unbalance, repeat.
//
Bits of equipment pile up in my house, like kit for a sanitized plastic BDSM. Adjustable shower stool with chromium side-grips, bath board for tube-attached squatting over the tub. Latch-on handles for clutching at everything, ready to suction to stretches of wall. All wipe-clean and snow-white, except for the knee-trolley. That's like a twisted jet-black version of the bike I never got as a kid, complete with bell and pump brakes and little front basket that I could wire flowers to. Something funereal and waxy like lilies, I think.
//
Birthing it from its thick black brace each night, I scarf my foot, I swaddle it—a thing of swollen violets and yellows, nonresponsive, a club of ice. The bed is a patchwork of welted blankets, pillows diagonalled, to keep both weight and winter off it. The toes are veined, don't remember me. The heel screams against the sheet.
//
I cannot recommend crying, on crutches. I cannot recommend stranding yourself in a hall, well-lit, on pinions, wet-faced, blind.
//
Yes, I have injured this foot before.
Most of my early dates with my ex-husband were conducted on crutches. On day two, he orchestrated a quad-bike skid with me riding pillion, and when I slid sideways the rear tyre tread hooked my foot, jerked it down, drove it into the ground. Brought the bike to a bony halt that he revved against, until he realized it was my leg jamming it. He stopped pumping, had to reverse off my sneaker, where it meshed into gravel, an envelope of pulped pink canvas. The rubbery thing left inside it was my foot.
I'd never told him about the rape I'd walked myself back from, once, one-shoed. I never told myself. But that night's ditch was lying just across the river from where he took me riding.
The body makes patterns for what the mind can't carry. It snaps in places the nerves were left to take on all that weight.
//
All the floors of the world loom with possible future spills, like slicked petroleum. My vision tunnels to a downward scanning for rims and warps, for ridges and softness. Outside is so much worse than inside, where at least I can rely on level planes, solid surfaces. Concrete pulls stunts of grit, or the sudden glaze of drains. Grasses cross-hatch the dark of unseen sink-holes. But inside horizons can still betray. Entrances come vacuum-sealed, rain-sleek, or metal-kerbed. Between me and a single classroom there must be a dozen deadweight doors. Mazed in the mind behind my iris there's a bright new atlas of ways to fall.
Each counterweight swing between my sticks feels bottomless.
//
My ballet teacher used to carry a stick. In those days she had permission to swing it at her pupils. She was gaunt, French, impeccably brutal, gauze-skirted. She'd slice at our tights when our toes weren't turned out. Thud at our derrieres, too jutting in our leotards. Jab at the soft sites we'd need to learn to starve.
From the ballet barre, you could see the cemetery. Tiny little figures clipped on the tombstones, limbs milled into dancing by the breeze.
//
I poke and pole the string-handled groceries down the hall when they're delivered.
Then I hurt too much to eat.
//
When we moved into my stepfather's house, his ex-wife, a ballerina, had only just vacated.
She'd left all her ballet books behind—page after page of high-gloss sylphs, gowns of ivory arcing the air, pirouettes executed on en pointe sinew.
She'd left them behind because my stepfather had thrown her out, down the stairs.
//
Good leg to heaven; bad leg to hell—this is the mnemonic Bonesurgeon gives me for using crutches to negotiate a staircase.
//
When I'm a kid in my stepfather's house it is not permitted to be sick, to be injured. He believes in mind over matter—the body can be mastered if the will is not weak. If I am sick, he will follow a code of staring straight through me at the dinner table. If I am hurt I don't exist, he won't speak my name, or turn in my direction.
In his house, I am always ill. I break bone after bone after bone.
//
Here is my foot, harnessed to blackness, weaving in its dead boot through another aerial day, forth and back, suspended over a grave. I creak on the carpet, supplanted leg left hanging from the stump of hip, which burns to hold its deadweight up, keep it from toppling me again, snagging on the doors and drapes, twisted like the tongue of a bell. Its medical ark is smelling now, a seamy boat of rot, all intimate claw-toed stench. I have to believe it is putting the bones back together. I'm getting better at stripping back its velcro fins, easing out my bracketed foot, laying it voided on a pillow to breathe, some hulk attached to me I've disowned, severing myself from its yellowness. It's swollen and caved-in at once, unrecognizably jointed; vessels mottle it thick as fish. How am I going to stand on this thing again, rise up? It doesn't remember me—though I can feel its tissues, stretched with panic at the pressure of a cushion. I tell it I love it—therapy whispers—but that doesn't stop the force that's building. How can something be so divorced from you, yet filled to the brink with pain?
Left in the sole, five little circles of ash.
//
The first time I break a bone, as a kid, the doctor can't find it, sends me home again, diagnosis sprain. It takes two weeks before my mother carts me back. I'm a burden with my whimpers, a thing of friction, winged.
They find the fracture then, in among the swelling.
Then they have to reset it.
When it heals and they carve it out of plaster, the nurse hands me back a yellow branch that is not mine. She says no, it belongs to me, but my elbow won't own its shrivelling—the bridge to my fingers is gone. The weave of the cast's sour lining is pressed into its skin. Its strings don't pull my hand.
My mind veers very high above a net of tendons I don't feel.
I pass out.
//
In the bone clinic the doctor speculates on how I blew chunks out of my ankle and foot. He stands up, gets gestural, plays acrobat in his white jacket. I watch him cycle through the stages of breaking, freezeframe, anti-gravity. He floats through what he can, then substitutes sole for hand, twists a palm to his face, in cracked prayer.
"You must have landed," he says "with your foot staring up at you."
//
The ancients write of a legendary creature whose feet are on the wrong way, humanoid, savage, able to flee at unthinkable speed despite their backward soles. They can only breathe the air of their valley, they can't be caught and transplanted anywhere.
The girl in the ditch with her mismatched feet could not survive raped in the real world.
//
In the mirror, where it hurts too much to stand, so I mostly don't, I look unventilated, lashless and seamy at the pink-rimmed eyes, grey to the sockets. I used to do things to myself in this rectangle, stretch my lids and etch on black, oil my mouth, gum the ends of my hair to make them shine, sluice my pores so they didn't belong to a corpse, add two stripes of false coppery blush. I used to fear being seen without it—the oval of my unpackaged face left me a little sick, that trace of pigtailed kid crossed with hag. But to do anything in the glass now takes far too much muscle—I don't even stare at the leftovers, just loom away from the frame like an apparition, not worth toothpaste, not worth a stonecold scrub. My mother would be horrified at the state of me—she'd use her last flicker of life-force to "put on her face." Like the circumscription of lipstick could fix anything—now even a cry takes too much anatomy.
//
I remember running the bath, climbing in with my teenage jeans on. Fresh from the op-shop, fruity logo on the ass, a baby-pink pair, labelled Peaches. Praying the denim could forcibly shrink me, fibres scalded at the reinforced crotch. I lay back, searing at the statuesque legs, thrilled to let the water paralyze me.
//
This bone-hooked shape, that flags from room to room, barely female, past its use-by, wilted—the stringy procession of it, going about its little stations—to do what, eat, shit, write? —lulling itself along between its sticks, in limp club-footed swoops—clothed in self-smell, third-day grossness, stubbed at crutch and stink-anointed armpits, waxy round incisors it won't bare to smile, streaky down the gown-front, laced with a canine perfume—your extramarital body-bag, your downed whore, the rotten thing that lives beneath the mistress.
//
I can't wear skinny jeans and I have nothing wide-leg. The mirrors in physio will just have to put up with graphic flashes of my unshaved snatch.
The thing that becomes my go-to uniform: a long knit robe that I must have thought was slinky when I bought it. Tall stretch sheath I stagger and sweat in, all-purpose, bra-less, a tight femme bandaging, space for the boot ripped deeper, like a bloody black onesie.
//
I hung onto my first cast for years. It felt more real than my arm.
It was withered. It stunk.
But my boyfriend had signed it.
//
When my ACC taxi doesn't arrive to ferry me to physiotherapy, I'm as lost as if stood up by my lover.
//
Shoes lie separated, all over my house—breaking up.
//
I wait to be picked up on my porch like a geriatric patient somebody has wheeled into the sun. I remember a visit to my nana, a wraith askew on the care-home veranda, propped in some other resident's clothes, saliva pooling in sounds past language. Was that the visit we took her to the waves? The blue reflected on her face was luminous, but her bones no longer belonged in time. The sea made a game of stripping away all memory of how to stand upright.
I used to dance, very little, in her lounge, clamped against her housedress, thrilling with giggles, riding her waltz on the tops of her velvet slippers.
//
That was when I carried you.
//
When my oldest learnt to walk, he rushed the space in front of him, arms and legs out wide, beaming, light-speed, like a star.
On the day my youngest learnt, we'd gotten up pre-dawn, jolted by an SOS phone call, to watch the Twin Towers come down. We propped the baby by the edge of the couch, and history happened behind him, holographically. A kind of ash we'd never seen crashed over and over through the television, and he wavered out of its particles, into my fingers.
//
There is nothing like walking my neighbourhood, wounded, out in the open, lamed, to light the fear in my body up—the thing that's underneath all the pain, the bracing—not a new state, but one that's lived in me all along, thrown into relief now, one-shoed, redlining: because I cannot run.
I'm almost, almost at the place where I have to thank my body for breaking. For bringing me face to face with all it's been carrying.
//
A background of chronic pain, I'm learning to say when I reach the end of corridors. I try to state it, bland, a fact, and not be shamed by the face of the person it reaches. I am fifty-one, not a little girl. I have two-stepped with agony long enough to know what I'm dealing with. I try to look back at the examining eyes, direct, and recite the basics, a history. Since my thirties, fibromyalgia in the spine, post-viral, scoliosis, then a car crash, a rupture in a cervical disc, a crushed nerve, box after box of pain meds that make the pain worse, that bomb me into house arrest, diagnosis CRPS. No, I don't take the drugs anymore. No, I am not going back on prescription.
So how the hell am I getting through this then?
On sticks. I'm getting through on sticks.
//
The last time I remember this kind of pain droning in my hips, I was pregnant with my youngest, bones securing his beautiful globe, a sling of muscle restrung to take the weight of him. Each afternoon, when it mounted to a pitch too hard to move, I'd climb into the bath with my toddler, who soaked us with squeals of soapy warmth, submarined in a playland of bubbles, and pushed at the moony moves of my belly, where inside his brother was trembling.
It has been worth any pain: to carry that loveliness.
//
It is making me dismantle walking, the musculature of retaking a step—the whole suspension of us seems utterly miraculous. That I ever stood up, moved forward, pivoted on this skinny fan of calcium, that everything in me had to rest on it, cantilevered, balancing. How in god's name did I stay afloat? All the tension that goes into one step, the machinery of pressure, will and ligament, the testing of flexion, the sensing of physics, the tissue's conversation with gravity...How did all of this work? And where has that pathway gone? The neural gap when I put that foot down—the nothingness that opens somewhere between heel and toe, a great gap my body fears it could fall through—a strange point where I can feel the blank, the absence, a physical space of forgetting, where my body has blocked out the shape that hurt it and can't remember how that shape moved—like the memories I once wiped out, so I'd survive.
What we can carry, what we can hold: the crutches are making me live the terms we talk about in therapy, inch by heavy inch.
//
They used to be carved aids, fashioned from branches, lashed from tree limbs to form a splint. I would have loved them wooden.
I could set fire to them when it's done. Whisper something as I watch them burning.
//
My small cottage has one long hallway, scene of a tiny marathon. At one end of it hang two portraits—my children, springing from the edge of the dunes, me with the camera, laughing and skewed in the sand, the vanishing point of their leap.
Bracing, I pace up and down, unbalanced, towards them.
//
In the midst of labour, I once stared down the sluice of my trunk—all its sinews shone with force. My spine was wild with a blood-red charge, a might that surged from scream to fork. My thigh muscles rattled with god, split open at the body's wet gate. My feet framed the future.
I never once said, I can't do it.
//
When I am down to one crutch, the other can often be found alone.
Stretched like a child, to lap at the sink. Or pining against the glass door, like it might let her go.
//
When I no longer need these crutches, will I remember how my arms used to live?
There will be so much air in my hands.
They might rise, like birds.
