Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

Mad had avoided being left, she supposed, by not having anyone arrive.

“After all that headache and heartbreak with your father, I wouldn’t want to get involved with anyone, especially not the earth. Plus, you know, the earth is a woman, and I guess it’s good just to be friends with her. I’m happy enough with that.”

There was too much wonder in the world, and the day wasn’t even halfway over.

She had, she reminded herself, home field advantage in this situation.

Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart. Is this why their father left them?

She was thinking about her dad. He had always said, from the very beginning, that winning and losing did not matter in sports at all. In so many ways, he had told his teams, the outcome is out of your hands. Sometimes the other team is just too good and you’re going to lose. Sometimes you get unlucky bounces; small, tiny reversals that change the entire trajectory of a single game or even a season. And so you could be happy when you won and sad when you lost, but that ultimately would not matter. All that mattered was that within the confines of that game, on the court, you did everything that you could and you played as well as possible, and you pushed yourself to excel and to get better and to thrive under the pressure. Because sports, he told them, was fleeting.

Every single game, he told them, every moment of your life, is just putting in the effort so that you can hold on to what you love for as long as you possibly can.

Her dad had said it all the time, how there are tiny factors that you can’t account for that will change the outcome of a single game.

“We’ve had our big family fight and now we’ve made up,” Pep said. “That’s how it works, I think.”

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.

She tried to convince herself that a life needed these moments, where you felt the split of who you were and who you became.

HE DIDN’T LIKE DOCUMENTARIES, because he thought they were a little stuck-up about the truth, because, as his dad had told him, all stories are fiction and to pretend otherwise is an artistic failure.

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.

That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn’t know what they saw.

That’s the thing with quests, she realized. You had to get back to where you started. And then you had to keep living. The danger of a quest, of getting eaten by a dragon or stabbed by an orc, was tolerable because you at least wouldn’t have to ride a Greyhound back home, weighed down with all the emotional trauma of what you’d done.