Editor’s note: this piece engages with the body, restraint, and a young person’s reckoning with what pursues her.
The child who runs down the street is clothed in sandals. They cling to her toes, strapped, slapping on the concrete gravel that grits the bottom of the shoes. The sandals thud hard against the hot street, making her feet thick with a tortoise shell of calloused skin. It’s a hill she runs on. Down, it’s steep. The long hair that coats her face and streaks the wind billows behind her. She can’t see. Her head, blind, guides her feet. They, though ferociously treading atop the hot pavement surface, barely seem to support the weight of her body and mane of hair. As she continues, she begins to lose control. Her head thrusts forward, sailing on pieces of wind and the sharp drop the hill has made. Her feet lag behind. They leak tears and have grown new skin. Tougher now, but still they stumble. They grab and reach for loose gravel as the sandals, worn now, have turned to paper sheets, ground into the concrete and melted within the pavement. They run, still. Her head grazes the hill’s surface. She has not fallen. Her feet still manage to cling to her body and coat of sailing hair as it accelerates. And as her blinded eyes direct her feet to dig into the hard road, she sees that she has no feet to let her run, for they are bone now.
The child lies in the sand. To rest. The world is slow. Her heavy body sinks into the surface while her eyes still run. Her mane of hair whips beneath the sand. It jolts her head, slamming it between the walls of her sunken hole. Her feet rot, scorched by the hot sand. A different pain. They are not bone anymore, but now a lump of loose flesh. They give a horrible stench, as does the rest of her skin, which loosens and slides from her frail structure. As the smell wafts and she sees what is left of her body, she must run. Her skin is dripping, sliding. She tapes herself with a wrapped cloth. Cotton. Stiff. Feet secured by thin sandals. The child runs down the street, faster than before. Her head tumbles more ferociously. Her feet clawing to stay afloat as her deep calluses pop and bleed. The child keeps going. She has more to run from now.
The soles of her thin sandals that slap against the street shake the walls of the world. The bird who sings in the tree on the hill flies away when he feels the world start to shake. So do the others. The rabbit, who is soft, and rooster, who is loud, aren’t safe and must run and hide. They run and hide and wait. In their hens and burrows, homes and nooks, the animals wait for the earth to stop its quake and for the child who skips to return.
The child who brings the animals out of where they hide is clothed in a soft dress. It is blue with bows on the shoulders and a pocket on either hip. Her feet are bare, shoes forgotten somewhere long behind her. Hair unkempt but smooth and still. She skips along a cushioned mossy ground that is cold and cool and squishes between her toes. The child stops often. She collects sticks and leaves, which she stores safely in her dress pockets among the other treasures she’s found. She wanders. Not scared of losing her way among the trees, she lets her body glide. But this version, the child who skips and brings the animals out from where they hide and is clothed in a blue dress has been chased off. The grass, once cold and safe, is now paved over with fiery cement. The earth that used to be still is now hot and fast as the child runs down the street, clothed in sandals.
Out in the world. The real world, not the land where the child runs, the dogs have found a body. They strapped it to the chair, tied its wrists and ankles, and left it there. It tries to escape. It does. They catch it. They watch it closely now. Around its eyes is red, and they are closed. It rips at the ties, and the body jolts and shakes, like it’s trying to run but doesn’t quite remember how. The dogs don’t realize there’s a child in there. Who runs down a street? Who is clothed in sandals. Who knows to stop running but has too much to run from now. And who they cannot catch because that monster who chases her is bigger, jaw wider, teeth sharper, and face scarier than the dogs who try to stop her. So the child runs. The body they found, limp and rancid, feeds her its skin. It gives its life so the child inside will never come face-to-face with the monster that chases her. So she can keep running. And so she can live, not a blue-dress, mossy-ground, soft and wandering life, but that one that stays just out of reach of the monsters’ jaws.
But more than that, what truly kills the body, who feeds the child, who runs down the street, who fears the monster, who is chased by the dogs, is the mirror that shows it its face. When the body looks at its hands and sees that they are the ones covered in blood. It’s not the Creature the dogs are after; it’s Frankenstein.
