I run fast. At least that’s what people tell me. But the whole reason to run on sand is that it slows you down, works you harder. For a runner, that’s a good thing. The feel of it giving way under your feet, the extra effort to move your legs, different muscles working. You become tired faster.
The dunes are amazing. The landscape changing day to day. They offer a great place to hide. If you wanted to catch someone who thought they were running fast, then the dunes were just right.
I pitched a quick look over my shoulder. I was almost at the tree line and the horses were still at the lower fence. Growing up around horses, I was not normally afraid of them, but when I walked through the pasture, I always had a feeling they would run toward me, trampling me in their haste. It was the wide open that made me feel this way. They were really very huge animals.
When I was small, no one would look at me for long. Their eyes would flick up, then flit away like a startled bird. I didn’t realize until I was about 6 that people found my looks… disturbing. There was a mixture of pity and revulsion teetering on a beam of required social behavior. Except for my Mother. She never shied away from looking. Her smile made me feel beautiful. She touched me as well, which other people seemed afraid to do. Of course, children were altogether different. They not only looked, they stared, mouths agape. They didn’t just touch, they poked and prodded… and sometimes chased.
2017
I stood near the river, assessing the old bridge, afraid to get too close. It had been 19 years since I had been back, had been this close to the bridge. My stomach knotted, and I questioned why I was here. I had done so well, making sure to never come near, rarely ever coming back to Mandrea Springs, much less this close to my childhood nightmare.
After I got “better”, a systematic act of pretending to forget, it was still too fresh to think of returning. Besides, my parents had moved me halfway across the country and there was no longer a reason to go back. No one believed what I remembered anyway. They looked at me with pity, calling it trauma. As the years slipped by me, it became more of a measured reaction, a plan, an obsession really. To keep myself from sinking again. Now I was 32, and I reasoned that I had nothing to prove, I had come back from there. But the bridge still called me sometimes, in my dreams and in waking hours. Sometimes I couldn’t help the needing to know, the sharp desire to understand. It sat like a small rat in my belly, gnawing just frequently enough to remind me it was there. I was no longer living halfway across the country.
I woke up, not in a dark cellar as you would expect, but in a clean, familiar bedroom. Unfortunately, I was chained to the bed with a gag in my mouth. This was the home of my close friend Paul. We were in some of the same classes, though he was pursuing psychology while I was fixated on sociology. I was here because I had found out his secret. It’s not important how, so let’s just say that I was too curious, and he was too sloppy, and sloppy drunk. I had found one of his experiments, so now I couldn’t leave, and thus couldn’t turn him in.
Another year gone, another bouquet of flowers, another vigil, more remembering. Every year I do the same thing. Maybe I’m punishing myself for not being there, or maybe I’m apologizing for being alive when she’s not. I go to the big stone in the park every year on July 17, the place where they found my best friend’s body.
