I’m running, running. I’m in my lane. No, it’s grass, there is no lane. It’s grass and all the kids are running. I’m a kid. We’re running, all in the same direction. I’m running fast, but not the fastest. There’s kids ahead of me, more muscular, more coordinated, more practiced, more focused. There’s a sun overhead, we’re all in shorts.
It’s June, the end of June. We’re in a big clearing. Faraway, in every direction, is a line of trees lined by smaller bushes. Every direction except one, where there’s a road. A dirt road with a ditch on either side.
We’re running, some of us faster than others, towards the trees, towards an arbitrary finish line marked by a stretch of yellow rope dropped in the grass.
We’re running, some of us more enthusiastically than others, towards the promise of prizes. $5 for third place, $10 for second, and a crisp green $20 bill for first prize. That’s a lot of money for an 10 year-old in 1992.
Some kids are giving it their all, their determination bolstered by their prior successes in running and winning.
Some kids are running because others are running, and so it’s just the thing to do. It’s two in the afternoon on a Saturday at the annual community picnic and it’s now that we run, so we run and the others are running and isn’t it fun? Green grass, blue sky, ponytails, neon shorts, elbows pumping, feet thumping the earth, a stampede of young tender bones in flashes of white yellow pink and not-yet-tanned skin, some lanky limbs, knees knocking, cotton shorts, white socks, running as one under a solstice sun, while the deer and foxes and coyotes reroute their usual paths through the meadow to the dim brush, human shrieks the tip-off.
We’re running in a pack and I’m in the middle. I’m almost athletic and kids all around me pump their legs forward and start gasping for air. This clean, sweet air in June.
It’s a race and though money is nice and I really want a walkman of my own, I’m not in it to win it, I’m only lightly applying myself. I don’t want to lose.
I imagine stopping all of a sudden and standing in place as the pack stampedes on and filters past me. I imagine standing alone where moments before there was a raucous crowd of running kids around me, while I watch them run on without a backward glance. Their statures shrink with the increasing distance between us. Off they go, the runners, my peers, without me, towards the yellow rope in the grass.
They know running is the right thing. Glancing to the right and left to see all the others running too, it’s the right thing to do and immediately they belong with each other.
Standing alone on the empty grassy racetrack, I glance left and right too. I am the only one standing and I am the only one in the field now. I’m alone in the field and all the other ones are running ahead, leaving behind anyone and anything that isn’t also running: me.
Time stretches and pulls. A silence invades my space. I’m the only one not running—why am I not running?—my face is hot and red. The spectators, all the spectators, wonder what’s wrong, why is she no longer running?
I’m just no longer in the pack, the pack is separate from me.
When the winner crosses the finish line and keels over, I’m somewhere else. I don’t hear the cheers. I’m starting to break, break through to something new.
The runners-up flash their feet over the yellow rope in the green grass, second place, third!
I’m turned the other way, gazing into the distance to that line of trees to the left of the road beyond which surely I’m being watched by a hare, or two hares in their grey-brown coats, small noses pumping, high alert.
I’m peering through the foliage, taking a step, gingerly onto the death of last summer’s leaves. I’m crouched, trying to see the hares. Another step, over the death of the last decade’s rotting logs. I feel a dry, brittle scratch across my cheek, narrowly missing my eye as I swoop my head forward. It’s a spruce, it’s its branches. There are no hares. One more step and I’m in the woods now with many spruce trees, scaly bark, and their dark knobs of crusty pitch. On the ground, turquoise spots on loose flaky logs, they’ve been there for a while. Oh and bright red mushrooms, they’re so small. Do not eat them. The hares are gone.
I’m peering through, the forest is dense, there’s moss on a rock, there’s a dark water puddle. What if there was a bear? Or a wolf? Waiting for me? I would like to see a lynx. I would like to ride a lynx, silver fur tufts between my knuckles, head resting on her head, gentle trot down animal paths to the lynx den. The den is limestone, in the lower ridge of the escarpment.
I’m wide-eyed gazing into the den. There the lynx has kittens, two little spotted loaves of fur with shut eyes, nosing around the dark. They can smell me, the little human child with human breath. They give a blind hiss and another. I am danger. I reach into the dark with my curious young hand. I know to move slowly. I know because kittens are babies and you have to move slow and gentle around babies. My fingers reach the top of a kitten head, the fur feels thick and soft. I pet it, then pet the other. So soft and cute. My hand pretends to be a tongue, a lynx tongue cleaning her babies. Licking behind the ears now and then under the chin. Cleaning the belly and the kitten armpits. The kittens are purring, I am their mother now. I am licking them clean.
I am picking one up and bringing it to me. Tiny little meow. I pull it close to my chest and look into its face. Little pink nose. Eyes still sealed shut, little corners promising to open soon. Fluffy ears with black tufts. Delicate little white whiskers. She’s so little. She’s purring into the crook of my arm. She nuzzles me. I kiss her nose lightly and she is perfect.
My baby will learn to hunt. She’ll learn to be a sprinter and she’ll sprint after hares in the forest. She’ll win all the races. She’ll have babies of her own. And every year she’ll contour the meadow on that one day in June, when the shrieks of the human race in the grass mark another year around the sun.
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