Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

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

This wasn’t supposed to be how a family worked. Family was just there when you appeared in the world, waiting for you. Each new addition after that, you had time to prepare, to make a place for them in your heart. The only danger was reduction, the numbers thinning out, people leaving. You weren’t supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o’clock on a Saturday after you’d sold out of eggs.

Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart.

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.

Maybe the secret to pain was to acknowledge it, to admit that it hurt so bad, so you didn’t have to pretend that it didn’t. And maybe it didn’t go away. Maybe the secret to pain was to respond to it in ways that made the pain worth it.

Maybe the only way to keep living was to willingly forget large parts of the narrative of your life and then just live with what was left.

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.

This was the way a normal family worked, she reminded herself. It came together and broke apart over and over again, all the amorphous ways it accommodated expansion and contraction.