Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Page B

run, banishing Peter altogether, although I hear him calling after me. What could he say that would change anything?
    I run like a hunted deer at the end of her race, my feet heavy and my legs weak, staggering with the effort. Nothing illuminates itself for me. All I see is the dusty street just ahead of where my feet slap down and rise up again. I enter the woods, and it is like stepping indoors on a brilliant day. Dimly, I see pulsing shadows, my eyes deceived by flickering sunlight, my toes catching as I trip on secret roots, my arms flying out to catch my fall. I stumble upright only to catch and fall again, again, running low to the ground in a crouch, bent over for protection.
    The nearer I come to our farm, the slower my footfalls, the more pronounced my bent-over agony. A cramp between ribs. A feeling growing inside me: if only I can delay arrival, Fannie will live on, that it’s my arrival and not her illness that will end her life.
    And I cannot, cannot go home.
    Instead, coming out of the woods, I veer away from the house and begin trailing around and around the back field, looping under the dark pines where fallen branches crunch and hurt my soles, curving down by the pond where little James drowned, and then behind the barn and away, out again toward the woods, past the woods, sliding under the pines, around by the pond, thinking again of James, to the barn where Father’s new windmill turns brightly, and out on the path that climbs toward the woods, veering past and under the shadowed pines.
    I will not stop.
    I run and run and run until I’ve lost count of the loops, until my hair is wet all through its heavy braid down my back, my dress soaked with sweat. The bones in my hips and knees and ankles ache with every footfall into the soft dirt and early weeds, and my breath comes raggedly, harsh in my throat, in loud gasps that alert my father, finally. I see him as I round the pond.
    Father is waiting for me to pass by the barn.
    I’ve stopped thinking about anything, and I’m surprised to see him there. I’m surprised to see anyone. I would run past him like he’s a tree or rock or weed, but he steps in front of me and catches me in his arms and I come to a sudden stop.
    I collapse onto his shoulder, my eyes and nose streaming, my throat choked with mucus, no longer a valiant messenger refusing to arrive, but an exhausted child of ten. A daughter. The youngest, the baby, the hoped-for son who never was.
    My father smells of wood shavings and rust. There is sawdust in his hair. I think that this is the closest I have ever been to him. It may be the closest I will ever be.
    “You’ll not be catching up to her, Aganetha. She’s gone ahead.”
    My sobs don’t sound like sobs at all, but like a struggle to breathe. I go limp in his arms. Father does not bring me to the house, where Fannie’s body is already cooling; perhaps he thinks this a kindness, or perhaps he is unprepared to go there himself. Instead, he carries me into the barn through the wide doors that roll open on oiled wheels so the farm wagon can drive up the grassy verge and onto the wide-planked open floor of the mow. My legs are long and trailing, bumping against his. He sets me down so that my feet meet the swept wide boards, and he waits for me to support my own weight, which I manage, heaving a shuddering cavernous sigh that drags me into myself.
    He climbs ahead of me up his stair steps and I follow. I can feel the muscles in my legs trembling with fatigue. We stand side by side on the level deck he has built, home to his completed invention.
    Wordlessly, Father shows me what he’s been working on: boards smoothed to silk, just that, just boards. They might have been for anything. But now they are not. Now they are for Fannie. I recoil from his offering.
    I see that we are speaking different languages, my father and I. Maybe we are saying the same thing, but it looks so different spelled out in the air between us that we can’t