Even the Earth was with her, its rotations helped launched her along the trail. In those moments running was effortless; her feet barely grazed the ground. Each step flowed from the last with the smallest amount of effort. Each stride building her speed. All the forces of the world egged her on. Helped her fly faster.

Faster. Faster than seemed possible.

Sweat glistened on her arms under the early afternoon sun; veins jutted up from her skin from the force created by the blood bombarding through them. Dusty wind whistled through her hair. Her face was impassive; giving off no signs of undue exertion. Breaths rolled in and out of her lungs: smooth and easy like waves lapping up against a shore.

She pictured herself as a gray wolf, languid and loping through ancient desert plains. Each step was a perfect in its economy of movement. Each stride repeated itself in perfect synchronicity as she slung her body across the red stone mesa.

Alone.

No one was around for miles. The emptiness of it was pacifying. It kept her mind quiet. The voices that chased her receded into the background, as she ran further and further away.

She veered down a path on her left that ran up toward a hunched, sandstone mountain. As she closed in on it, the elevation gain of the trail intensified. A burn seared up across her thighs. Her muscles tightened, and her breathing quickened. Her strides grew shorter. Sweat dripped down into her eyes. When she reached the peak of the fist, she stopped to drink in the views that stretched out into the horizon bright, azure horizon. The blue of the sky was so strong it hurt her eyes. But she couldn’t look away.

A glassy ocean stretched far to the west of where she stood like a great rippling pane of glass. It was the greatest piece of stained glass that God had ever created. Behind her, to the east, stretched stark, scarred canyons, with no civilization in sight. The landscape was sharp and jutted like an old farmer’s gnarled brown hands.

She put her hands on her waist and stretched her hamstrings. She heard her heart thumping blood through her veins. It was a glorious feeling to listen to the engine of her body work.

Quiet. Quiet.

It was quiet, finally. No voices intruding into every moment. Nothing to scare her, or encourage to do something wild, or terrifying. No, the only sounds came from a bush rustling in the breeze or from a lizard romping through dry grass. The quiet washed over her like warm bath water. It comforted her in ways she found hard to describe, even to herself.

Running into nature was the only thing that quieted the voices that haunted and hunted her. It was hard to say why, exactly, it was so effective, but it was. At this point, she had tried everything else to hush those insatiable demons, but in the end she realized she could only run away from them. The runs kept them at bay for a little while. If she didn’t go out, and run and run until her legs pulsed with lactic acid, then their claws sunk into her, pulling her down, down. Sometimes, many times, when that happened she though it was the last time. That it was the time where she wouldn’t be able to pull herself back out. But if she stayed on her feet than she was safe, for that time at least..

The shoes on her feet were nearly worn through. The Solomon logo was basically inscrutable. Small holes had opened in each side of the shoe for dust and pebbles to creep through. So she wore two or three pairs of socks at a time to prevent, or at least slow, the onset of blisters. Some old knock-off Oakley sunglasses rested on top of her bleached out hair. She had gotten them by trading a guy some Clif Bars a few years back. The glasses had proven themselves surprisingly durable. The lenses were colored and gave everything a yellowish tint. It made the word look as if was painted in gold.

An oil tanker stood way out in the distance. The massive ship created nothing more than a dot on the horizon. Perspective was everything. She put her arms over her head and stretched out her shoulders. Sweat had collected in the small of her back so a sudden gust of wind gave her chill. A shiver ran down her spine. The ship sat out on the horizon: alone and impassive, she wondered if there was anyone even on the ship. Or did it just sit there, waiting for someone to take it away. Popping her sunglasses back over he eyes, she bounded down the other side of the hill.

Her mind meandered as she ran away from the peak. It was cycling backward. Trying to set a timeline for everything. She figured she had been itinerant now for what must have been nearly five years. Dates and times weren’t essential info for living on the street. She never really had anywhere to be on any specific day, or anywhere at any time. You had to save space in the mind for the essentials. If she didn’t, and started thinking too much about the heavy reality of it all, it brought a deep state of confused depression. Then she would find herself starting to slip into the void; into one of those deep fissures between the canyons. She imagined it was feeling very similar to that of someone falling off the edge of the trail. Grasping for anything to prevent the fall, but knowing, deep down, that you were doomed.

The only recourse when that started was to run. That much she was sure of: it’s a basic fight or flight response. Fighting for so long had put her on the street in the first place, she thought, so now she wasn’t going to hang around to see what was happening. The answer was to hightail it into the hills as fast as she could.

She forced her mind back to nature. Allowing these thoughts in was dangerous. Checking her belt she felt she still had a few gels and granola left. She had stolen some nutrition from a local shop the night before. Crept into town under the cover of the leering moon and got out before anyone was the wiser. Her feet bounced along the track running along the ridgeline: head bobbing up and down at any easy cadence. The mountains looked like adoring fans jumping up and down in rhythm with her steps. A smile crossed her lips at the thought of someone cheering for her.

She floated down the mountain; feet barely grazing the Earth. For those moments, the voices couldn’t keep up with her.

This is part two of a multi-part short story. To read part one “The Cell” go here.