The Runner

Heel lock the sneakers and then gone on his way, never be seen warming up. Eyes pressed into the double paned windows, “it’s the neighbor he’s out running again”, because no one ever once saw him begin, only passing, each property block that served as sixteenth mile markers in an even trot because it is the elastic banding of movement, a slowing then speeding up again which suggests an ownership of a place. The man who smells flowers must have flowers back home that smell different and difference is what those in their homes craved. Bermuda grass cropped in each lawn to regulation length, two story homes with layouts borne of the same training data, each permutation of room length and width carefully sold as a personal touch that could only be verified by a visit to the lots on the other side of the highway. A highway that wiped the mind clear when crossed over so that should someone happen across their home’s carbon copy at a dinner party, or a Christmas walk with grown children, it was a happy happenstance. “Doesn’t this hallway look just like ours?” But the carpet was different, or the slim table was thicker, or the walls corners were pocked with notches from children that they would never allow in their own.

The runner never saw any of these organs, and so he could see they were not all the same. He could see that the nameless Mrs. No-one had over trimmed the hedge twice last year in three thousand sixteen. See the burn mark in the side yard of two thousand and four where Mr. No-one had tossed out the grease. The abaxial of dead blade from where the lawn met the curb in three thousand and eight from whacking too close. The drip-stain on cement where four thousand and thirty three’s hose leaked out constant. The spots made anaerobic at the corner of three thousand sixty eight where the small boy always sat, obscured from the corner window but not obscured from the runner. He saw all of this but they never saw him as long as he kept moving, never slowing when passing a neighbor at dawn.

A nod.

A nod back.

Then pulling himself forward over even cracks of cement away from a starting line that was different each day, sunlight’s horizon the finish, unreachable once it stretched out to midday. The stretch from noon to past five quiet, hardly even a time at all, in which the neighbors were gone either from home or within. Then an unimportant rush chased by a dying of movement at an hour you could not say exactly but that it was notched by the pulling of blinds that dulled them. A blanket of polluted night that the one hour drive from the city could not hide, draped over the McMansion shoulders, each fold perfectly in line with the corners of homes who’s eaves did not shield them from the snow, if it ever came at all. The warmth of this blanket heating the people’s minds that resided so that each one thought the earth was his own new creation. Guns posed by the bedside to match the ones stayed outside, their bravado tipped orange by the knowledge that nobody had ever come and they never would. And it was under this cover of night familiar that the runner wedged himself between the gap that two fences provided. A schism in lot planning easily resolved would either homeowner dare to speak to the other. Each fearing that his homestead would shrink in the ensuing surveying - company man against company man. A standoff, their laser pistols ending in red must-kill dots on the over-mortgaged squares.

And he bundled himself tightly in rotating sweaters so that no one smelled more than the others for it is a good place to be homeless where there are nothing but homes.