Resolutions
Can’t run forever
Rafa looked to the sky just as a new streak of orange projected above the clouds around Mount Eisenhower. The name was a misnomer as it was little more than a glorified hill. But today, running its incline in this heat, Rafa felt it was more than living up to its name. His shirt clung to his trunk like a poorly tailored second skin, and every breath came as a muffled scream, growing more harried as his lungs fought the effort to propel his sedentary body forward. Each step, he realized, was a mistake.
How…could I…have let this happen? Rafa wondered each thought in pace with the agonized rhythm of his breathing. He’d never had trouble finding an excuse to keep from exercising. No reason was too embarrassing or trivial: Bouts of diarrhea. Long work hours. That weird clicking noise in his left knee that he assured people was a torn meniscus.
“Ugh,” Rafa panted, “this…feels like shit.”
“Yeah, well, you look like shit,” quipped Eamon with an easy, steady breath. His form was effortless, each stride quickly eating up the miles beneath him. “You told me you wanted to start this year off right — like you told me last year and the year before that, now that I think of it. I’m sick of you complaining that you’re out of shape, so just keep it movin’. Alright, huevon?” Eamon grinned.
Huevon, Rafa thought, fighting back a coughing fit. Yeah, I am lazy. Shouldn’t have taught him that insult, though.
He can’t muster the energy to roll his eyes, not that he would risk breaking his psychic hold on them. They’d gone numb five minutes into the run, and the only way he kept them moving was through some telekinetic grip. He was sure of it. If his eyes left their post for even a second, his legs would turn to concrete, and he’d shudder to a stop.
“How much longer?” Rafa wheezed.
“Just over that hill is two miles.”
Eamon Tyree Haynes could’ve gone pro at any sport — hell, at anything, really. The thing was, he respected himself too much. Often some mouth-breather who watched Eamon play college ball would ask why he never played in the pros. The answer was always the same, he ‘refused to sacrifice body and mind at the altar of entertainment for the benefit of the slave masters that run professional sports.’
Instead, he became a pediatric cardiac surgeon while maintaining his college physique. In other words, a god amongst men, wealthy, doing meaningful work, and the envy of all sexes. This was no more evident than now, with Rafa, spent, who looked every bit like a dying animal that someone refuses to put out of their misery. Meanwhile, Eamon’s chiseled arms swung effortlessly at his sides, his skin the rich luster of an onyx piano. Even the fine sheen of sweat on his forehead gave him a Herculean glow.
“There’s a playground just up ahead with a water fountain and a bench, so you can take a break and tell me how terrible all this is,” Eamon said over his shoulder as he picked up the pace. Rafa wondered how many people had died on this trail or if he would be the first.
A noose of heat cinched around Rafa’s neck and ears, and every breath brought the vicious, incessant sting of several colonies of fire ants feasting upon his insides. Still, he fought to keep up with Eamon, an impossible task, but surely the man would have to stop. At least, Rafa hoped.
The concrete path had given way to gravel, then dirt, sometime back, and the only sounds were the crunch of each step and the occasional Grackle call. The trail skirted around Mt. Eisenhower, jutting out of the tree cover just long enough for one to look out over the sides at the impressive drop below before being blanketed by the forest again. Exhaustion shifted something loose in Rafa’s vision — or was it his brain? — because the world went grey, save for the brown of the path, the amorphous green around him, and the offensive orange beacon ripping through the sky. Shape and form lost their crispness, turning to psychedelic blurs. At least one tree appeared to be waving at him with the practiced ease of a Sunday Pastor, a basketball hanging from both hands.
They reached the promised clearing with its cobweb-infested pavilion, playground, and rusting grills. It made up for its lack of amenities with a picturesque view overlooking the surrounding forest and the San Antonio skyline. It was a welcome sight and would have been quite beautiful to Rafa had he been able to summon any feeling close to giving a damn. They might as well have run to a garbage dump, as far as he was concerned.
“Finally!” Rafa groaned, stopping in front of a water fountain with the grace of a wounded animal, seconds away from giving up the ghost. He propped himself up, hands on his knees, feeling like the past 41 years of his life were stacked haphazardly around his shoulders. Somewhere along the run, his heart migrated to his ears, an expected side effect of performing more exercise in the past thirty minutes than he’d done in the past thirty years.
“I’m impressed. I didn’t think you’d make it this far,” Eamon said with a smirk that would have infuriated Rafa had stars not occluded his vision.
“Eat…me,” Rafa choked out between breaths.
“We could make this a weekly thing, you know. Maybe we can substitute this instead of happy hour.”
“No…” Rafa whined. “Happy hour is…the only thing I have…to inspire me.”
“Well, if you’re after a drink, then you’re looking at it,” Eamon said, gesturing to the fountain. He slapped Rafa on his back, “Kidding. Of course, drinks are on you when we get back to the car.”
Rafa twisted his face and limped to the fountain. The water was practically boiling and tasted like a rusty cast iron skillet, but he drank greedily.
“Easy,” Eamon warned. “You’ll give yourself cramps on the way back if you drink too much.”
Rafa pretended not to hear and cupped water over his head, half-expecting it to steam on contact, baptizing himself with renewed vigor.
Eamon mumbled something that the wind carried off.
“Wha?” Rafa shut off the fountain.
“Desi’s leaving me,” Eamon said with a protracted sigh.
Rafa’s sugar-starved brain barely made sense of the words, but he studied Eamon for a moment. The bravado and swagger from earlier were gone. So, too, was Eamon as he’d always seen him. In its place was this deflated thing whose great shoulders, creased with muscle even at rest, sagged in front of him, and they visibly shook. Rafa was so gassed from the run that he’d failed to notice the dimness in Eamon’s eyes, tinged red from crying and stress.
“You’re joking,” Rafa blurted. There was no question to it. Eamon’s life was damn near perfect. Statuesque body, a fulfilling career, money, and, at least outwardly, an ideal marriage. A model existence that Rafa envied for as long as he’d known him.
“The joke’s on me,” Eamon exhaled. He shuffled past Rafa to the bench and collapsed.
“How?” Rafa asked, feeling lightheaded and breathless but no longer from the run.
“She said she grew out of the marriage. Just like that, can you believe it? Like I’m an old shoe, and she’s ready for a new one,” Eamon said. The mental dam had broken, and he could no longer hold back the flow of thoughts.
“No — ” Rafa started.
“No counseling. No discussion. You know how Desi is. Once her mind’s made up, it’s over. Time is made of seasons, and our marriage has seen its last summer,” Eamon whimpered.
Rafa froze, processing what to do or say next. A gust of wind whistled between them, the herald of a coming storm, maybe. He walked toward his longtime friend, placed a hand tentatively on his shoulder, and struggled to remember everything you’re not supposed to say in these moments.
Eamon stood almost immediately, shrugging off Rafa’s hand.
“Wha — wow, so that’s how you react to someone trying to connect with you?” Rafa raised his voice.
Eamon took another few steps away, then stopped.
“What the hell, man? You better not be joking about this. Next time just keep your shit to yourself if you’re going to be this way,” Rafa fumed, falling against the back of the bench. He turned his head to say something else, and that’s when he saw it.
The sun just kissed the horizon, the last vestiges of day retreating, but enough light allowed a good look around the playground, surrounded by a dense wall of trees. There was nothing remarkable about it, gravel floor, wooden railroad ties as a perimeter, and all the expected equipment — slide, monkey bars, and a child-sized clubhouse.
Then there were the statues.
Against the background of the extinguishing light, their silhouettes were so lifelike they looked like stand-ins for the real thing: children at play stopped in time, some running, some crawling. Most, though, had their arms and legs spread as far as possible, as if mid-jumping jack, the heads tipped back so that they came to rest on their backs at an impossible angle.
Rafa noticed some of the figures were taller. Parents, perhaps, added to this scene to complete the look of families at the park. It looked like some sort of art installation, but what should have looked like a lively, emotive scene instead felt unsettling.
In the time it took Rafa to survey the area, Eamon had walked past the shapes and toward the tree line.
“Hey!” Rafa called out, getting to his feet and taking several paces into the play area. “We’re not done here, you selfish sonofa — ” Then he stopped.
Rafa was close enough to one of the figures to see that it wasn’t made of concrete or metal. In fact, it wasn’t a statue at all. It was plantlike. Organic. Rafa remembered seeing something similar in his social media feeds. A woman in England weaved life-size figures of horses, stags, and even humans out of willow rods. Those seemed to rise out of the surrounding forest like fairies or the physical embodiment of a forest spirit, elegant and beautiful.
Not like these.
It occurred to Rafa that these things obstructed the playground, making it unusable. There was no way children could weave their way through them in play. Some of them even blocked the slides and swings.
“Didn’t you say this was your favorite trail?” Rafa called. “How long do you think this park has been abandoned?” His eyes traced the playground equipment expecting signs of disrepair or graffiti, but there were none. Even the metal slide was still polished from use.
“Hey!” Rafa yelled out. “When was the last time you came by here?”
Eamon mumbled something inaudible.
“What?” Rafa yelled back as he inspected one of the things near the slide.
“This morning,” Eamon’s voice broke. “I got a few miles in early because I didn’t know how far you would go.”
“I don’t like these things, man. They give me the creeps,” Rafa said, stepping closer to the nearest figure for a better look, giving it a wide berth. It leaned at a slight angle and was rooted to the ground in two places.
“This place is always packed with kids, and these things weren’t here this morning,” Eamon’s voice was faded and thin.
The more Rafa looked at the thing by the slide, the more foreign it became. It looked like a cactus, the ones everyone thinks of — round, with thick limbs turned to the sky like elbows. Each one was waist-high with a smooth, emerald green trunk. Instead of spines, flat, veined leaves sprouted from it. A pinecone the size of a basketball hung from each branch, playfully swinging along with the breeze as it whispered through the trees.
“Weird,” whispered Rafa. He saw something, and the puzzle pieces came together. It was the eyes. A cold realization slapped him across the face, crystalizing, across his body, immobilizing him. The growing shadows sharpened features in the dying embers of twilight.
The figures looked too lifelike, too human — because they were.
Rafa didn’t see an artist’s carefully sculpted pupils or knots in a tree but actual children’s weeping, terrorized looks. They stared at him, pleading, their mouths tiny slits of twisted agony. From the look of them, they all seemed to be running away from the surrounding forest.
“What…” Rafa stammered, “…the actual fuck is going on?”
He turned to Eamon only to see him standing in front of a towering tree with pinecones the size of a compact car hanging from each branch. Eamon’s face was inches away from the pinecone when it erupted.
Cannon-fire and the hollow cracking of tree limbs reverberated in Rafa’s head, popping his eardrums and hammering his chest. When he looked again, the outer layer of the pinecone peeled back like a piece of popcorn, and the air surrounding Eamon was saturated with a cloud of fine white powder.
Rafa took several steps, trying to run toward him, but his legs would not hold him. He fell to his knees and watched Eamon, just visible through the haze, struggle for breath, clutching his throat as he tried to dry-swallow and clear his airway. Every exposed, wet surface on Eamon’s body was caked in the white substance, from his sweat-soaked skin to the whites of his eyes.
Within seconds, his chest ballooned, and Rafa heard a quick series of pops. A cluster of emerald tendrils shot out of his nose and mouth, groping the air for support before slithering down his body, encapsulating him. The tendrils pulsated, wrapping around his face and neck before snaking down the rest of his body with a life all their own, rooting him where he stood.
Tears streamed down Eamon’s face, attracting more white particulate, until he wrenched his head back, his jaw yawning to an unnatural width. His hands loosened their grip on his throat and snapped outward.
The white mist remained suspended midair in defiance of gravity and reason. Slowly, in a collapsing wave, it fell in Rafa’s direction. It took him far too long to react before finally kicking with his legs, moving backward in an ineffective crawl. His back slammed hard into something, and he could retreat no further. Rafa clamped his hands on his eyes, nose, and mouth, hoping to prevent the same fate as Eamon.
But the powder never came. Instead, Rafa felt another gust at his back, and he looked up to see the puff of white sashay in the wind, soaring up and away from him. He released his breath and swooned from the horrors he’d witnessed, but he was happy enough to still be alive. He turned to see what he’d bumped into, and his forehead bumped against something hollow.
An eruption, this time like a burst tire. It looked to Rafa like someone had tossed several bags of flour into the air. He heaved forward, and his eyes witnessed the city skyline adorned in light in the distance. The white cloud from earlier was rolling towards the city, held aloft and commanded by the summer wind.
Another shroud of white filled Rafa’s vision, and with it came searing pain. His tongue was carpeted and immobile, and deep within his chest, he felt a tickle as something sprouted up his airway. There was another round of popping, and the resulting pain could only mean his ribs had torn free of his spine. His final thoughts seized him as his neck snapped backward, and the growing night filled his vision. Funny enough, his life didn’t flash before him. Instead, he focused on one thing —
If only I’d thought up a reason to skip this run.
