Running Past Normal

 

Fifty miles west of Bloomington lies Hillsboro, a monument to middle-class malaise. Fern covered front porches with white picket fences settle impervious to everything, but flags, harvests and lemonade stands. A sense of yesterday lingers in each neighborhood where attics house button downed memories folded away in massive trunks. Children laugh on summer afternoons and winter mornings, as school bells and church bells peal.

That morning she decided to go for a run. It was not her typical decision. Usually, after she had gotten both husband and children off to their various destinations, she would sit down for another cup of coffee, a peek at Dr. Phil or a long drag on a pencil she pretended was a cigarette holder.

Today was different. Today she had glanced at something that encapsulated every lost dream and every lost desire sacrificed on the altar constructed by teenagers and maintained by adults. It was just something written by an unknown name, but just the same, it struck her and echoed throughout the washing of dishes and folding of clothes.

Somewhere right now, in the heartland of America, in the subterranean reaches of a city, a man is running.

She searched like a mad man for her old pair of sneakers. She didn’t have running shoes, but decided that tomorrow she would splurge. But for now, what she had would have to do. One of the laces snapped in half when she pulled her bow tight. Yesterday that would have been enough to stop her, but today she ran into her son’s room, pulled the lace off of one of his shoes and laced her own.

There was a list of errands waiting to be completed hanging on the corkboard by the door, when she stepped outside into the morning sun and exhaled the air with the same joy as someone who had been confined for years. Every care dissipated while one remained: 

“Only a thin veil separates me from everything and everyone I love or have ever loved.”

She stepped onto the pavement feeling its hardness beneath her feet, while knowing that beneath her and through the grass, dirt and rock, was another woman, on the other side of the world, going to bed at the end of the day sighing as dreams blossomed from nothingness, only to die with the sun.

Bending down to touch the earth, she believed, even for that moment, that she could touch the face of that sleeping woman to let her know that she was not alone.

Her first steps were awkward. She hadn’t run in years and soon realized that her body had lost the ease of youth. As she bent down to stretch and feel the groan of unused muscles, she knew that this dream would take every bit of her strength to breathe. 

“It’s almost like giving birth,” she thought, as one again, she began.

This time her steps felt more assured of their placement, one behind the other with a quick gait that became more powerful with each movement. She quickened her pace.

She was running.

Her feet thumped the pavement like worries. She ran though no one was in pursuit. An echo from some past dream had awakened an urgency that dragged her from the subterranean reaches of complacency to frenzy.

Her heart pounded, though not so much out of exhaustion, as joy.

She ran like an outcast from some forgotten place. The sky was yellow when she’d begun and red by the time she realized that the landscape of her life had changed from poised and positioned to free.

Fifty miles east of Bloomington is Normal, a straitjacket to conformity, where everything and nothing is what it is to those who live there. As she approached it boundary, she wondered if she should return. Her husband needed her. Her children needed her.

“No, I’m going to run past Normal,” she thought after taking a break to eat a lunch of sweet cakes, honey and black olives before returning to the road.

Manna never tasted so sweet.

She had found her stride and whooshed past blurs of people, houses, life as one border zoomed into another.

There was an undertow of exigency like a nagging pulse forcing lifeblood itself through her tired veins. She was not adroit at running; tripping on rocks and troubles with equal clumsiness. But she always righted herself before tramping on. There was a candle in the window of a curious little house that she passed along the Cape Fear Coast.

She smiled at the odd symmetry of running in circles, though the earth is a circle so we are all running.

There were many who came and went along the way. She had slowed down for some and hurried past for others. Others waved or winked, while others frowned and threw stones. It would be a lie to say she had not lost her step on occasion, but she redeemed herself from the sins of imperfection and returned to her former course, wiser and well trod. She had d loved and been loved though she could not stay put. Chased by monkeys at a temple in India where the moss grew high among darkened trees, she laughed as she remembered that just yesterday she had been bored.

The faces of her husband and children appeared and disappeared in storefronts and horizons. Longitudinally speaking, she was usually silent except for the huffs and puffs of air she released unconsciously.

An old woman gave her orange slices that were dripping with juice. She ran through terrain familiar to both the Jewish and the Gentile troubling ancient dust with peaceful steps. There were children laughing in Gaza and children laughing in the heartland of America. Effigies of forgotten political figures hung from pole to pole with no one lifting up a gun or setting off a bomb in retaliation.

The world revolved as it always had been since before the beginning.

Yet she continued to run past and through consciousness amid cavalcades of recklessness and ruin. She had begun her passage with carelessness as her mapmaker and knew that she wouldn’t end it until oblivion closed her eyes. But that wouldn’t be for years yet. Now there was only the road before and after her with nothing between them but eternity, and the smiles of children playing in the dirt.

Garden Grow

Blossoms of the living and dying flooded the forest floor threatening to overtake this territory of trees, which had long stood master above everything below. Now, instead she had removed wildflowers, mosses and roots of never-born vegetation to decorate her surroundings as she pleased without knowledge or care of the lives she ended with a yank from her indelicate hands. 

Today and today and today; her raspy voice repeated a chronic repetition of commands, lists, errands, and multitudes of nothings soon to be left unaccomplished in rummage heaps of mental debris. The floorboards squeaked beneath her unsteady steps providing replies to the weight of unheard conversations.

Remembering this or that from when or where would cause sudden smiles to surface on life furrowed skin, providing glimpses of the bright shining hopefulness of possibility which had faded, bit-by-bit, with age. Then, still smiling, she would scratch her head, until the smile and all it had brought with it quickly vanished into obscurity. 

“So much to do and not enough time. So much to do and not enough time,” her words, almost a song while hammering a nail on the grey-faded woodwork of the little house in the woods that was her home. Like its occupant, long overtaken with age, it stood seemingly abandoned and waiting to fall.  Rarely seen cars lost on roads would find it accidentally, with owners assuming they had found some forgotten make shift place soon to be completely enveloped by the landscape. Seeing their headlights floating across her walls like specters jarred her back to the consciousness that there were others in the world besides her with lives to live, things to do and time to waste until it ended.

He had seen her on one of her rare visits to town to buy supplies. He knew she always followed the same pattern of appearing every three months or so, and amid stories of her strange ways and odd appearance. Talk about the crazy old coot who lived in the woods had embellished his childhood with imaginings of who she was, where she had come from and what she would do to any foolish enough to come within her grasp. There was other talk; talk about money hidden in floorboards or secreted away somewhere in the ramshackle walls of her home. He watched her unsteady steps and flicked a foraged booger onto the pavement, and then slicked back his hair, pulled up his collar and smiled, as wicked imaginings trailed and spiraled from a long drag of his cigarette.

She took no note of him as she labored past on the way to the fulfillment of copious misspelled lists of items and inclinations soon to be crossed off in a hurried swirl. Shop owners and children pestered her with insults or offers of sticky-fingered accusations or hugs. She abhorred them all and comforted herself with the knowledge that while necessity had forced her journey here, soon she would return to the comfortable darkness of her home with its walls lined with homages of dead ones now turned to dirt, and ash.

Hours later, he stood behind a tree surveying her movements as she traveled back and forth from the corroded car parked nearby. Waiting, waiting, waiting for the ever-present darkness to pale from grey to black, he blamed her for the sunset’s slowness, vowing to take it out on her after its surrender.

This would be an easy job. Soon he would have everything he had always wanted, and more. Soon he could stare directly in the eye of every snooty girl who had ever turned him down. He would make them beg, and then kick them away like so much trash. Every wish, every dream lay just a few feet away, teasing him, forging hatred upon hate from every person who had ever wronged him to hover, and land squarely on her shoulders.  By the time he came up behind her, he had thoroughly convinced himself of her guilt in all the hurts that had culminated with him being here in this moment, about to strike. 

It happened so quickly; at least that’s how it seemed, until now, too weakened and unable to move he became aware that she was dragging him very slowly across the ground to a freshly cleared place covered in flowers not usually found in forests. What had happened? How had it happened? Memory, his memory, which had always been keen, failed him.

“Very pretty, isn’t it?” she said noticing the jagged back and forth movement of his eyes. “Did it m’self. All of it. I love that patch over there of clamshell pink flowers you’re lying on…” Then, trailing off forgetting herself and then remembering, “I had absolutely no idea I’d have c’mpany so soon. You’ll like it here. All the others do. Have a good sleep, I’ll be back out in the morning to take your picture and sow the lime. I used to slake, but it doesn’t do anything for the slugs, don’t ya know? Read that somewhere in a science book.”

He wanted to scream, but blood had sealed his lips into a tight red smile; besides, he knew there was no one but her who would hear him. In time, exhaustion overtook his all thoughts of escape, even as crows came to feast on his neighbors in the wood. There was nothing now, but the reckoning that some children’s stories do come true and that happily ever after had always been the lie.

Days, weeks, months went by and seasons changed. Time continued to pass as it always had and ever would, as she watched her garden of the living and the dead blossom upon the forest floor.