Runaway

I love a good challenge - and so, Fractured Literary’s recent Micro-Fiction contest was the perfect puzzle. The task? Write a piece of flash fiction that’s 400 words or less. And so, “Runaway” was born, entered, and even made the contest’s short list! It’s amazing what pressure and prompts can do for the creative brain.

Runaway

He picks me up in Manitoba. I can see his eyes through the insect-splattered window; they are tight, small slits. The rest of him sketches like a cartoon villain: blonde hair gelled back, clean shaven face, weak chin, thin lips. He is a bad guy, a bad man, and I know this when I get into the car.

The following year, I am in Saskatchewan, swimming in an ocean of canola, hands planted in dirt, and meanwhile, the bad man has just completed the purchase of an abandoned motel along an evergreen-heavy roadside in northern Ontario, where there is no cell phone service.

By the time I start to see his face less and less in my dreams, he has given up his aspirations of refurbishing the rotted, asbestos-poisoned lodge to seek a new opportunity in Alberta. Along with false hope, he also leaves his car behind, the same beige vehicle whose passenger seat I once occupied.

The bad man is too close to me now; only one province over from my rural prairie sanctuary, I can feel his leering presence.

Shortly after his slippery arrival in Alberta, he infiltrates the oil fields, marries, has a child. The night his baby is born, I am over in British Columbia, recovering from a miscarriage.

A few years after the birth of his son, his wife leaves him and takes the boy. The bad man moves into a small apartment and tells anyone that will listen that his ex is a scorned cunt, and I can feel the hot spit of his words on my skin from where I am, 1,436 kilometers west of where he is living.

Ten years from the day he picked me up on the cold shoulder of the Manitoban highway, I am now three time zones east from the bad man, but can still sense the clutches of hatred closing in on him from all sides. The result is a combustion, an irreparable severance, an inherent disgust rooted in everyone that has encountered him, for each of them understands that he is somehow no good; it is a smell he gives off, a tainted taste he leaves, a deep down gut feeling that everything about him is unforgivable.

And so, the hate engulfs him; it swallows him whole. He ceases to exist.