Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

And then I wrote. The edge is a shantytown—and I took another deep breath, realized I hadn’t been breathing that whole time. My vision got all fuzzy. Zeke touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I was already writing more—filled with gold seekers. Zeke looked over my shoulder at the paper. “That’s . . . okay, that’s kind of cool,” he said. “I like that.” The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, I wrote. There was this little voice in my head, and it was telling me what to write down. And I knew that this little voice, this tiny, insistent voice, was not God and it wasn’t some muse and it wasn’t anyone in the world except for me. This voice was my voice. This voice was my voice and no one else’s voice, and I could hear it so clearly. And it wasn’t finished. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. And then the voice was gone. It went way, way back inside me. And I didn’t know if it would ever come back. And I finally read what was on the paper. “We are fugitives,” I said to Zeke, smiling. I was starting to laugh, a little hiccup of a laugh. “We are fugitives?” I asked him.