Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

It was not something she cared for, relying on anyone else, hoping she got what she wanted.

He was out of place in so many ways that she started walking toward him as if prepared to offer directions back to . . . the past? The future? A city? Anywhere but this place, she figured.

It was a tone of patient acceptance with a simmering undertone of deep reticence.

To have been witnessed searching for her missing father who had never once tried to even contact her was a kind of embarrassment so specific that even now, as an adult, she could easily remember that sensation and feel the heat rising to her face anew.

She had occasionally felt the weight of being his progeny, of holding whatever made him leave inside of her.

It was a part of herself that she hated, to think that she was so deficient that someone was scamming her if they said she was interesting.

But just like Graceland after Rube had picked up Mad, there needed to be some absurd thing that helped you come to terms with the new discovery of your family.

But she also knew that this was the tenderness of wanting a person you care about to avoid this kind of pain.

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.

You could expand your horizons as long as you occasionally got to run right back to the only thing you really knew.

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.

She couldn’t imagine it. It was a pain that seemed impossible to fully accommodate at any age. To be left by your father, only to learn that he wasn’t even your father, Mad tried to imagine it.

He took out his notebook and wrote down: bigfoot kids hold on to kite kid.

Do you feel like you might be dying, but it’s low level and you don’t want to acknowledge that possibility because it will make you look weak and crazy and so that makes it even worse?”

That’s the thing with quests, she realized. You had to get back to where you started. And then you had to keep living.

They were so unique, so strange, and they would now know each other for the rest of their lives, beyond their father, long after their father. It was, Mad realized, a gift she had never expected. She was a gift to someone else. She had never felt like that before in her entire life. Not once.

Although, she reminded herself, he had already been left behind once without any sense of why. He had been scarred like them. The difference was the distance between being lost and being found.

It was so strange, how time gets away from us. She could live in this moment forever, maybe, but then she walked to the chickens, shuffling along the fields, and she saw her mother. And she decided that she would enter back into her life.