Distance
There wasn’t much a runner could do. Her feet wouldn’t stop bleeding unless she stopped. And she couldn’t stop. More than that, the road kept cycling beneath her. She’d worn-out crying a while ago. Her body long lost every tender droplet of moisture. Sweat away, cried away, sucked away by the ever-present distance and the pounding of wounded feet that would. Not. Stop.
She didn’t count days anymore. They bled together like the stains on her socks; like the painted ticks on the highway, one after the other into endless lines. Delineator posts graciously keeping the miles in check.
Gotta know your miles.
Time was in heartbeats that didn’t come. In the pounding of feet no longer present on this earth, yet somehow always moving. Her real carcass, the real Bridget, lay crumpled and leathery on the side of the road, somewhere miles behind.
She tried to stop when the body dropped, but the relief of its weight gone was like a sling shot snapping back in the launch-code aftermath. She looked back to the wasted mass that used to be her only way out. She never stopped to wonder if she missed Bridget. It seemed a pointless question to ask. How can you miss something you can’t remember being tethered to?
Can you miss your umbilical chord?
Still, she was here. And she could not stop.
What else can I do? The runner formally known as Bridget asked the wind that blew memories of her hair free from a scraggly ponytail.
Without the body bag? How far could I go?
How far can a soul go, untethered?
No purpose.
No reason to stop.
She passed by a field; one just the same as the last. Green and stagnant but for the waves of Indiana heat rising off irrigated dirt. The fences the same, farmers on tractors, cows grazing.
This soulless square sat no different.
But what was that, tucked into the corner of the field? Just beside the dirt road, stretching its long arm to a distant farmhouse, stood a small boy, his arms propped up on the fence. It struck her strange that his eyes followed her as she approached. For miles she was a wind, felt not seen. Yet here were two beady blues on her, above a sour scowl.
Bridget’s specter paused, looked away from the ticking lines, the pebbled shoulder, the endless distance. She stared back. Surely he’ll look away, or through, or go back to doing little boy things. But his eyes pierced like hooks into soft hay bales.
“Where you runnin’, lady?”
His voice impatient and unnerving; the click of a grasshopper’s frantic leap.
She felt the breeze skim a layer of ragged soul away.
I don’t know.
“Don’tcha have a home? I ain’t never gonna leave mine.” The boy turned away, sunlight hitting the columbine’s teeth marks marring his round, toe-headed skull. The specter stared in bereaved awe until her feet, knowing the distance still left ahead, dragged her on.
Sarah Reichert is a novelist, poet, blogger and dabbler in non-fiction. Her work has been published in Cooch Behar Anthology, Rise: An Anthology of Change, Sunrise Summits: A Poetry Anthology, The Fort Collins Coloradoan, and Poetry Ireland Review. She owns and operates The Beautiful Stuff Blog, a quirky website devoted to writing and building up new authors.