Running Into Trouble Read online

  Running into Trouble

  by Mina McShady

  The woman had always thought of human bones as being brilliantly white and pliable, like a plastic Halloween skeleton. But the oddly assorted bones her dog was avidly sniffing were yellow and brown, like old parchment. When she picked one up, it felt dry, rigid, and easily breakable. The only reason she could identify the remains as human was the skull. Its distinctive shape—the high forehead, the vaulted cranium—said homo sapiens in clear Darwinian terms.

  Feeling a rush of empathy for the anonymous man or woman collapsing into dust beside the forest trail, the woman instinctively jerked the leash in her hand, causing her dog to whine. The sound cut through the woodsy ambient noise of settling trees and small creatures scurrying through the leaves. She shivered, suddenly afraid, remembering hundreds of friendly warnings to always hike with a friend because bad things happen to women who walk alone. The fresh smelling pines and firs that had seemed so solid and comforting were now looming and ominous.

  The woman fished her cell phone from her backpack and flipped it open. She knew she should tell the park service about the bones; they rightfully belonged to someone’s family. Damn, she thought, no signal. She told her dog that they were going to walk out of the woods and call someone from the parking lot. At forty-five years old, she still wore the same size that she did in college. She didn’t want to die.

  -felis concolor-

  Felis concolor, the predator, let the morning air flow through his nose and over his tongue. It tasted like meat. He looked through a curtain of tall, dry grass and detected a large animal moving towards him, steadily and rhythmically, from low down on the slope of Big Hill. It wasn’t shaped exactly like his usual prey (it was taller, narrower) but, then again, he hadn’t eaten for fourteen sun cycles. So he hunkered down and focused all his attention on the prey-thing, tensing his muscles and readying himself for the Long Leap.

  From his place of ambush, he could see that, although the animal was healthy and not lame, it was struggling hard against gravity and rough terrain. Instead of moving in a straight line, it seemed to shuffle from side to side. He knew that if he pounced when the prey was most tired and vulnerable, just as it was approaching the top of the hill, he could easily take it down and end his long fast. An image of a fresh kill swimming in warm, ferrite-rich blood flickered through his mind. Saliva poured from the corners of his muzzle, and a loud purr rumbled from his chest.

  As the prey animal moved closer, he identified it as one of the Tall Apes. Their scent was mostly sweet and sour, with some chemical overtones he couldn’t identify. (He’d never eaten one before, so he wasn’t sure how it would taste.) This Tall Ape, though, wasn’t all that tall. And it wasn’t as lean and sinewy as others of its kind he’d seen. Its hairless face, suffused with blood, was surrounded by a floppy mass of hay-colored hair. More importantly, its pale soft neck was just about the right height for the Killing Bite. But he would have to judge the distance just right because much of its body was covered by a shiny, red carapace he wasn’t sure he could bite through.

  He twitched with anticipation, restraining his natural instinct to chase, to attack, as the prey-smell grew stronger and more complex, carrying a wealth of information to his specialized brain. He could tell that this Tall Ape ate fruits and nuts and berries, that it had traveled through the Muddy Bog some short time ago, that it was a female, and that it had just come from the lair of a male companion. And that it was totally unaware of living its last seconds under his predator’s gaze.

  The strike was seconds away. He could hear the Tall Ape’s ragged breathing, and he sensed a certain dull sluggishness that wasn’t caused by sickness (he would have smelled it), but by something he couldn’t understand. He felt it was ready for him, ready to complete the cycle of nature by filling the emptiness in his belly. The powerful muscles along his haunches flexed, his breathing became more rapid, and his pupils leaked into black pools.

  And then the wind changed direction, blowing strong and cold. It washed away the thick, warm, sweet-salty smell of prey and brought with it the commingled odors of impending rain, rotting leaves, and the growling metal monsters from over the ridge. The predator opened his mouth and used his tongue to search for his lost prey, but he couldn’t find the meat hidden within the new swirl of scents that overwhelmed his senses. He raised his head and curved his neck, trying to catch sight of prey-motion in the midst of the undulating grass that covered Big Hill.

  It was too late. This time.

  -Helen Kale-

  Helen Kale popped out of the woods and chugged the last half mile toward her home on Steepclimb Road, breathing heavily. She jogged every morning at 5:30 am.

  When Helen first started running, she’d loathed it. But, over time, her attitude had mellowed to moderate distaste and, later, to mild dislike. Finally, she decided that it really wasn’t any worse than cooking dinner, washing dishes, sweeping the kitchen floor, or any of the other intrinsically boring yet essential chores she did every day.

  After she passed her neighbor’s mailbox (it was painted to look like a bumblebee), Helen slowed to a brisk walk. She’d had an odd feeling during her run, as if someone were following her. But she knew that wasn’t possible. The popular trail she took every morning was quiet and pristine. It cut across a topographical checkerboard of thickly canopied pine forest and bald, brown hills that the Big Fire of four years ago had cleared of trees. She hadn’t seen anyone, or heard any footsteps behind her.

  And besides, the town of Crawford’s Notch (named for the narrow valley in which the town was nestled and nicknamed “Crawford’s crotch” by jaded locals in honor of the swarms of snowboarders who appeared every winter) was one of those ostentatiously safe small towns where most of the people still left their doors unlocked.

  Helen stopped to stretch in front of her house, a modest split-level “starter home” with a miniature yard that nevertheless had cost around half a million dollars. She’d bought it just a year and a half ago, at a time when Eli had been especially ambivalent about their relationship. Back then, he would routinely call her at work before lunch to break up (“I just need some space, okay?”), but still drop by her apartment (one of two units in an apartment “simplex”) for dinner, wearing a sheepish, child-like grin. Then, after some cooking and some cuddling and some wine, he’d decide to stay the night.

  Before he went to sleep, he’d always pick up a new toothbrush for six dollars at the overpriced Notch-on-the-Bedpost 24-hour deli-slash-tourist trap because he refused to either leave a toothbrush at Helen’s apartment (“too much commitment”) or to pack a toothbrush when he came to visit (“rigid and not spontaneous”).

  At this point, a less determined woman would have been driven mad by the mixed messages and become an emotionally exhausted wreck, finally acquiring a hard-won immunity to Eli’s confusing charm. But, for Helen, Eli was fate. Just two weeks after they met (he had rear-ended her car and begged her not to “get the insurance companies involved”), she “just knew” that he was The One, and that nothing he said or did or slept with or crashed into would change that. So, one evening, instead of cooking Eli dinner, she put him in her car (a practical Subaru Forrester), and drove him to what she had called “our new home.”

  “You may not be sure about us,” she said, “but I am, and maybe that’s good enough. Sure, you’re going to freak out, and say you need space and more time. But, in the end, I know you’ll come back.” And, eventually, he did. Exactly one month after she had closed on the house, Eli asked to move in, “just on a temporary basis.” And, ever since then, they had been, if not exactly happy, then productive and useful and quietly content.

  Certainly, living with Helen had helped Eli’s
fragile career as an ultra-distance runner. Within weeks of “settling down,” he stopped spending nights at the townie bar (the Uvula) and started getting more sleep. He ate regular, healthy meals that Helen prepared, and he grew ever-stronger as Helen started keeping his training journals and coordinating with his coach (an ex-hippie and part-time guru) to constantly adjust his schedule. She even started running, so she could be his pacer during his longer, slower runs.

  The cumulative result of Eli’s new lifestyle (made possible by Helen’s superior management abilities) was a shocking and unforeseen victory in the 2004 Crawford’s Notch Death March, a 100-mile race held every fall that attracted ultra runners from around the world with its $50,000 purse. Helen had caught Eli in her arms after he crossed the finish line with wobbly legs from severe dehydration. Afterwards, she held his clammy hand as he received intravenous fluids before the awards ceremony, choking back tears of joy.

  Still intoxicated with exhaustion, he said, “I love you, Helen” for the first time. And then he added, “You’re so good for me. Like a salad.” This made Helen scream and then laugh so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Later, though, she wondered if she wouldn’t rather have been compared to something delicious yet sinful, like chocolate ice cream. It was a small thing, but it nagged at her, especially in the early-morning quiet after her runs. Instead of breathing the cool crisp air and meditating on her good health, stable middle class job (as an actuary for Global Insurance), and relative good fortune, her mind picked at scabs. Like her sex life, which, despite her many efforts to “work at it” with Eli, was bland, boring, and routine. Clinical, even.

  Every week it played out like bad Kabuki theater. On Saturday night, Eli would come to bed a half an hour early. He would snuggle with her for a few moments, whispering uninspired compliments in her ear. “You’re a great gal,” he’d say, “such a great person.” After the five minutes or so of cuddling came five minutes (ten, if she was lucky) of mute foreplay. He hit all the right targets, but his touch was strangely impersonal, neither rough nor soft, and he avoided talking, as though he were struggling to concentrate on a difficult and unpleasant task.

  Once he thought she was ready, he would flip her over so she lay on her stomach and begin pumping away with his eyes and lips clamped shut. Then, after about two minutes and seventeen seconds (once Helen had actually timed it with a stopwatch) of bucking and groaning, he would come, sigh contentedly as though he had finished a workout, and fall asleep.

  Otherwise, except for their Saturday encounters, he just wasn’t interested. If Helen approached him on any other night of the week, he was alternately tired from having just run hard, in need of rest to run hard the next day, or nebulously ill. As she stretched her hamstrings, she wondered, as she did at least ten or twenty times a day, why this might be. Her first impulse was to blame her thighs.

  Objectively, Helen knew she was generally attractive, tasty even, and she mentally checked off a list of features that resided, in her opinion, firmly in the plus-column: naturally blonde wavy hair, an oval face with a tiny, turned up nose and even features, a big chest, small waist, and flawlessly pedicured size-five feet. But, no matter how much she focused on her good points, they disappeared under the long shadow cast by her gigantic dimpled thighs.

  She speculated that Eli had been traumatized by the sight of her thighs that one time, long before the sex famine, they’d done it in a brightly lit dressing room at the Gap. The three-way mirror was harsh and unforgiving, and it had certainly killed Helen’s desire. Instead of seeing a sexy couple in love, all Helen could see was a diet ad for porno queens. In her imagination, a baritone announcer warned, “In today’s action-packed pornographic pictures, you can’t hide behind satin sheets. Extra pounds mean lots of unwanted motion in your most active sex scenes. Try Porno-lite today.”

  Or maybe, Helen thought, that was just the way things are in most serious relationships. Sure, none of her other boyfriends had been so perfunctory and evasive in bed, but, then again, she had never lived with any of them. None of them had been The One.

  She finished stretching and entered her house, which smelled ever so slightly of lavender potpourri. Helen was proud of the work she had done to transform the house from a series of empty, interconnected rectangular boxes into a real home, and she got a slight, I-can’t-believe-I-did-this thrill every time she walked inside. The foyer was painted in a welcoming shade of yellow, and a chocolate textured shag (that had taken Helen weeks of trolling e-bay to find) guided visitors to a small but airy living room filled with plants and warmed by a dramatic red-and-gold oriental rug. The kitchen, which overlooked an itsy bitsy strip of grass, was all chrome and spotless white linoleum, and the bedroom was filled with tranquil blues and greens.

  The only room that did not have a distinct identity was the extra bedroom that Eli had, since he’d moved in, been planning to set up as a computer room from which he could manage his motley collection of racing sponsors (two local shoe shops), maybe do some freelance web design projects (he’d studied both the “idiot’s" and “for dummies” design guides), or even some freelance writing for second tier health and fitness magazines. Instead it remained filled with unopened moving boxes holding old computer equipment and Eli’s redundant collection of charred pots and chipped dishes, inferior in every way to Helen’s carefully kept matched sets.

  Helen checked the time. It was 6:30 am. After downing a glass of water, she assembled Eli’s breakfast, snacks, and lunch for the day. Despite the importance of good nutrition to his running program, Eli, when left to his own devices, might alternate between skipping meals and gorging himself on pizza and candy bars. She also set up the coffee machine so it was poised to brew as soon as Eli woke up (Helen herself was more of tea drinker), and collected Eli’s supplements from a dizzying array of jars and bottles, leaving the assorted pills on a blue plate.

  She showered quickly while making lists of things to do in her head. She would eat breakfast (an energy bar? some toast?) in the car, pick up toilet paper at lunchtime, and drop off the dry cleaning after work. Eli could have grilled vegetables, rice, and broiled chicken for dinner. The kitchen floor needed mopping.

  Helen padded into the bedroom, the sounds of her footsteps muffled by plush sea-green carpeting, and dressed quietly so that she wouldn’t wake Eli, who might sleep until 10 am. In the hours since she’d hit the snooze button for the last time, Eli had entangled himself in the midnight blue sheets. His legs were bent at an angle, as if he were leaping a hurdle, his hands were tucked under his cheek, and his face was peaceful.

  Although she was on the verge of being late for work, Helen sat on the edge of the bed and watched Eli sleep. She studied his long, dark eyelashes and his black glossy curls that he refused wear shorter than chin length. She ran her finger lightly against his cheekbone, feeling smooth skin and scratchy stubble. I can’t believe this beautiful man is mine, she though, I could watch him all day. But Helen couldn’t really do that; she had to drive to the office, even if there was a 1:25,000 chance of having a fatal accident on the way.

  -Eli Hawthorne-

  Christ, will she ever leave? Keeping his eyes clamped shut, Eli struggled to breathe evenly, while staying as still as possible in a position that was cutting off the circulation to his left hand. As his girlfriend (her official name was Helen, but Eli called her Hell) tiptoed around their bedroom, Eli arranged himself into new position in what he hoped was a convincingly unpremeditated way. The blood rushed back into his hand, setting off a cascade of electrical charges, making Eli miss the disconcerting numbness that had caused him to move in the first place.

  Eli listened to Hell opening and closing drawers. Only a few more minutes, he thought, and she’ll be gone for the entire day. But malevolent, unseen forces were tuned into Eli’s brainwaves, and they decided to test his resolve. Soon, he felt a light tickling on the sole of his left foot. At first, he tried to subtly flex his flex his toes as a way of distracting hi
s neurons. But he stopped as soon as he realized that Hell had sat herself down on the edge of the bed. The risk of betraying wakefulness was too great. Hell’s moods had been wild and unpredictable lately, and he didn’t want to chance facing her angry, tear-stained face before his morning coffee.

  The light tickling coalesced into a single itchy point and an overpowering urge to scratch. Eli held his breath and hoped that Hell would leave soon. She had a regular, grown up job, and she couldn’t just be late any time she wanted, could she? Could she?

  Then Eli noticed a new and strangely plastic sensation on his face and quickly realized that it was Hell’s carefully and expensively manicured fingernails. (Eli didn’t understand why Hell would spend so much time and money on nails, which were, at least in his mind, nothing more than calcified dead skin cells.) Because holding his breath wasn’t doing anything for his itch (and because he just needed more oxygen), Eli quietly exhaled and began taking in small mouthfuls of air as though he were sipping it through a straw.

  Meanwhile, Hell kept stroking and rubbing, petting Eli’s face as though he were a giant rabbit or a cat. And then she began twining her fingers though his black curly hair, which, unbeknownst to everyone except Eli’s immediate family, was permed on a regular basis. Without realizing it, Hell pulled a few hairs from Eli’s scalp. This was painful, but it did nothing to interrupt the continuous itching on the bottom of his foot, which grew stronger and began to resemble burning in its intensity. Hell kept playing with his hair, clearly in some sort of trance. In the amphitheater part of his brain, a Greek chorus began chanting go to work, go to work, go to work.