recovery runs
so I searched “flash fiction prompts” on google and chose a link that led to a list of twenty-eight of them. a random number generator gave me the number twenty-three. the twenty third prompt was “Write a story that takes place in less than 10 minutes.” this is what I wrote. happy friday lol.
To hear listed the many rules and particularities with which Mary approached her morning jog around Uncle Bern’s farm one might mistake her for a far better runner than she in fact was. This mattered not at all, obviously, because no one was asking about her habits and Mary had no desire to share. Mary ran as a matter of fact upon waking not because of any notable talent or passion for the sport but to get ahead of the day and everything in it. There was the incident at the high school back when she was taking that long bus ride always through wet pre-morning and after that it was better to stay here, better to wake up in a silent house to dress alone and travel around and around a broad loop in steps that bounced but not that much. Mary had two pairs of white sneakers ordered on her laptop and mailed from far away. Two pairs identical but for the soles of cushy rubber in either purple or light blue and she alternated them on days odd or even. She stretched for two minutes on a patch of grass to the left of the front porch then proceeded to the dust blurred drive in a high kneed march which wobbled always when she had to cross a stone barricade at the lawns edge, just one foot tall. Mary listened to The Carpenters on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Thursday she ran along to songs from the musical Grease. But Tuesdays and weekends were silent as a punishment or superstition. Mary had maintained this routine so steadfastly over such a long spray of days and months and with her mind so carefully, forcibly blank, that she no longer remembered the exact origin of the ritual, only the vital importance of maintaining it.
Mary—grey eyed and long nosed and rarely seen in town, small but not exactly thin, soft white valleys and hills rolling up from her running shoes to the thick, shining ponytail of which she was proud—began slow and went on slow to end slow, mostly, but for a final half minute of lung-tearing, gravel-slapping sprinting to make it safe back up five yellow stairs and then behind the screen door.
Tall trees and tawny land. Bern didn’t run the farm much like a farm anymore but for the horses and he slept later than his niece. He loved the girl because he had loved his sister and so she stayed on in the little room upstairs and they kept to their own separate ways. Mary would be eighteen before winter came and there had been no talk of what would happen, even as summer days peeled away in humid curls like old paint. The lack of a conversation only heightened the fact of this looming deadline. If they ate supper at the same time by accident Mary could hear the big man not saying how she scared him, how he wanted her to leave.
Down the long drive and then hooking right, Mary moved carefully, forcing her breaths even, keeping her head high. When the small creek crossed, she hopped it and landed on the left leg. Anything else would mean certain doom and unrest and the sounds and Mary ran to make the quiet and she ran just right. If she felt tired, she would think hard to herself “wake up, Marigold,” which no one called her out loud anymore. And if her ankle turned and hurt, she would press that food down with extra force on every step and the hot whistles up her shin then were preventative, foundational. Mary’s parents had been the apple-cheeked and wide-open type. The pair of them with gold leaf heads: sporty, cheerful, heartily amused by network sitcoms and mystery books. As their only child before she was nobody’s child Mary watched her mother and her father, much in love, enjoy anything and everything, baseball games, raking leaves, peaches from a roadside stand, with a vigor she felt for only the silence, for staying inside it.
Overgrown grass to the hip and climbing at the far corner of Bern’s land meant the second bend and though someone called out then asking Mary to stop a while, she had of course been expecting this and she kept going without even an eyelash betraying her having heard. They didn’t touch much anymore and what was there to be afraid of, really, when it was just sad whispers and you were going to ignore them and press on and be alive at breakfast and after. If the calls got louder–and the calls got louder–well, that was nothing worth thinking of at all. It was worse near the woods so Mary ran near the woods. It hurt to go along beside so much wanting and to say nothing in response so she came there every morning and she kept going away smoothly with eyes up but never very fast. Mary’s mother and father had been tremendously alive until they were dead and Mary had been very quiet until she awoke in the hospital to a high wall of chatter crashing on her bed like a wave bending down to take a whole city out to sea. The family car had been flattened by a truck in the night. Uncle Bern was crying and Mary was not the same.
A secret truth which Mary thought but didn’t say, as even if she wanted to say it there was no one to hear but them and she didn’t speak to them anymore, was that probably the voices weren’t so bad. It was not the content of the speech but the fact of her hearing it, the unavoidable, reeking wrongness and violation which disturbed the peace and rhythm of living until dying, this, this was what made the messes that left her alone. When the power went out at the school for fifteen days and doors locked on their own and alarms cried even when the fire department had only just shut them off all after Brian Corcoran dropped, smiling down, the melting carcass of his chewed tobacco into Mary’s pasta salad on a wet Wednesday when she was missing her mother with the dazed and desperate nausea of one just awoken in a hotel tub blood drenched and down a kidney, well. What can you say? Hardly anyone was hurt that time and all that came after, even, could be made to seem reasonable and maybe only fair when you remembered that there are pains which scream forever no matter who can or cannot hear. Mary ran in a clean line for as long as it took to reach the proud old tree that lightning hit on the night she arrived with her four boxes and red duffel bag and, touching the scar with her knuckles for less than a moment, she turned left toward home or anyway the place wherein to wash and wait and make rules to make silence and toast frozen waffles and try not to speak.
consider: I AM GOING TO SEE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ON SUNDAY NIGHT IT IS ALL I AM THINKING ABOUT. thank you and goodnight.