Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

“I am enjoying this,” she said. She didn’t consider the future that much. She would get older, and her life would change, and she got bored thinking about it. She was more interested in right now, finding the exact moment where things changed or you finally understood that they were important. She liked the present. The past wasn’t that far away and the future seemed undefined, so she sat with her father and focused on this moment, the chickens clucking, scratching at the ground, and the steady breathing of her and her father.

Mad knew from the experience of finding Pep that it was hard not to consider your own moment, just before you found out the truth. Of course, Mad understood that life was made entirely of moments where you could see the break, the before and the after.

She tried to convince herself that a life needed these moments, where you felt the split of who you were and who you became. Without those moments, what was your life? Just an unbroken line that went from birth to death? Though that actually seemed kind of nice, Mad admitted, how lovely the sound of that unbroken string would sound when you thrummed it, a single sound that died when you did.

It was messy, to think of things as a narrative. He didn’t think of things as a beginning, a middle, and an ending. In his life, he mostly didn’t know if things were ending or starting. He was a kid, for crying out loud. Everything felt like a beginning and an ending at the exact same time. There was no middle. It was all beginnings and endings, over and over, until you got old and had enough footage to determine what the story was about.