Runner
This is where I am now.
This place has been chosen with great care. I cannot see, not even with a wide scan or a narrow squint, any sign of another living person.
If I turn 180°, that’s where the people are. The houses sitting squat and sedate under the August sky, and the people within them cleaning their stoves, mopping their floors, flicking through channel after mindless channel on their flickering flat-screen TVs.
I have stopped being among them. I am leaving the food-encrusted pans to rot in the sink. The grimy mop rests on the floor, over which are scattered the remains of a thousand fishing trips or jolly jaunts to the allotment with a four-pack of rancid beer.
He can sit there on the sagging, dirt-brown sofa with his sweating neck staining the cushions, and his next can in his meaty fist.
Out there, in front of me, are miles and miles of solitude. Back there; those pans and mops and sweating fists. This is where I am now, caught, in this moment, between the two.
Right here is nothing but the quiet stillness of burning, budding potential. The calmness of it flows through my head, lifting me slightly onto flexing soles. I breathe twice.
This is where I am now.
I pull back just slightly, and spring forward, fast, and I run.
