Run on Red

by Noelle W. Ihli

I’d really never thought about what the people who didn’t make it onto Secrets to Survival might say if they could sit down in that interview seat. The people who starved, lost their grip, succumbed to the cold, or couldn’t fight off their attacker. The ones who didn’t make it out alive. What would they say? I’d always secretly thought they must be a little bit weaker, a little bit less committed to hanging onto life. A little less intelligent. A little less scrappy and savvy. A little less educated in the art of avoiding the bad things. But maybe the truth was even scarier than that. Maybe, sometimes, there was no way out.

Something larger than a spider shuffled next to me in the dark, and I imagined myself somewhere else, anywhere else. Back in the apartment, watching Gray’s Anatomy reruns under an oversized pink quilt with Laura in our pajamas on Saturday mornings.

He was the villain in my and Laura’s story. But in his book, he was the star of this show.