Epektasis

He stepped onto the board.
The board waited.

Arthritis in his ankles,
quiet for now.

The warehouse behind the store—
concrete polished by weight,
by repetition without thought.
Forklifts had written their turns
into the shine.

Here, the wheels could whisper.
The floor didn’t grab.
It didn’t help.
It gave back exactly
what he put down—
a fraction late,
a fraction forward,
his back foot hunting
for where it used to be.

For a moment
his feet remembered
and his body stalled,
as if the sentence were there
but the ending wouldn’t come.

Between shelving,
between machines paused mid-task,
he moved through borrowed space.
Nothing objected.

Outside, the street corrected him.
Cracks said so.
A curb answered once
and he felt it up his wrist
before he understood
what happened.

A staircase remained itself.
He looked away.

Back inside,
he rolled slower.
Listened to the hum,
to the small bite
when his weight arrived wrong,
to the board’s brief argument
under his shoes.

Sometimes—
no one watching,
nothing worth repeating—
the ground carried him
longer than expected.

Not kindly.
Not cruelly.

When the shift ended
he stepped off,
hands warm,
breath uneven,
something tight in his chest
that was not pride.

The floor did not follow him.

He stood a moment
with the board under his arm,
waiting for the concrete
to say more—

and it didn’t.