For Bekka the trick to getting in a lunchtime run while running a drop in center is to have a generous definition of what lunch time means. Around 11:30 each morning she will start to get ready while she chats with the runaways and the regulars, and the first time she finds herself alone, up goes the sign.

GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON

And, just in case someone were to happen by who does not remember their Pooh – and to be accurate, that would be just about every one of her clients who might happen by excepting maybe Pester John – she also hangs up the cardboard clock with the moveable hour and minute hands and the legend saying “We’ll be back at…”. She circles the cardboard clock hands to 2:20, locks the door behind her and starts running. Morning-stiff legs, ankles too heavy, her first strides are flat and low, stirring up the curls of steam hanging on the wet sidewalk. Legs stretch and probe forward, her breath a fuzzy percussion against the snapping of heart on breastbone. The clownish wide soled running shoes mark an irregular path up the sidewalk like a wobbling cogwheel. She hunches her shoulders, swinging her head, finding the grit inside her neck and shaking it free. Across Burnside, up the narrow lane that curls up like a tongue into the park, bordered with spraying ferns, fronds swaying like cilia. She takes in different, greener air now. Striding, length, speed, reach. Muscles stretch and fatten with blood. Her breath begins to even, splashing against the floor of her chest.

Off the writhing pavement, out of the trees and across the steaming grass then crunching up the gravel path into the rose garden. The air is thickened and then rarefied in wave fronts of scent. She plows nose-first through crest and trough, heading further into the sea of light and air.

Up the steep path toward the Japanese garden, now she is being pushed from behind, her body porous to an energy that has been gathering around her. It begins to seep in and she feels herself expanding, filling a larger volume in which particles oxygen and light spark and fuse. Suddenly her body dilates and she is reborn, all leg and pumping arm and loud exuberant breath. Blood, breath, electric muscle. Gravity dispelled. The steepness of the path draws her up on toe and calf and churning hip. She is chased by a trail of earth-dark footprints. Past the garden gate, up to where the wooded trail flattens out.

She feels thin and tough and hungry for air. She is racing now, sailing over miniature landscapes of rainwater and mud and soft bark. Far below, the carp glide through the Japanese Garden’s ponds and she calls out to them. The very volume of space resting against the side of the steep hill buoys her. Shedding sweat and stale breath she runs in and out of notches in the hill, veined with stony rivulets of falling water. The run is a performance, the path lined with admiring multitudes of spring-green shoots and branches. Her skin and clothes are fingered by a thousand leafy touches. Look! She can move!

The trail emerges into sunlight and stretches itself taught against the flank of the hill. She dissolves into the air in her lungs. She isn’t running any more, not even moving. Something else is moving her. Energy welled inside her chest and extruded through her skin, prickling the backs of her hands. When the trail disappears again into the shadows gathered by a battalion of young trees, she catches sight of a rolled up sleeping bag, olive drab on the outside, red plaid on the inside and a man sitting on it in a tiny clearing made by a fold in the trail. He is facing away from her but the sound of her footsteps makes his back straighten and his head turn toward her. Black hair, grey stubble, worn out shoes, worn out face. He stands suddenly as she approaches. One arm stretched out before him, waving vaguely back and forth like one of the clawing branches overhead.

“Make me wait for you, bitch? Make me wait?” The hand that snakes our toward her is strong and heavily veined; the man is used to grasping. Bekka stops and stands facing him. He is lean. Sunken eyes, bad teeth, a filthy torn parka mended with duct tape, stringy hair with embedded alder leaves. A huge bowie knife in a sheath on his belt. At a moment when she might have become focused and directed, she glances around and it seems only potentially real.

She starts to say something to him, a bargaining of some sort. Then suddenly she is off, trying to run around him, with an elbow flared out at her side, the way she might try to fend off a stray dog. When that scrawny muscular arm grabs her, the jolt rushes to all parts of her body at once. She turns into him and pistons her knee upwards, but she misses the groin and the impetus of the motion brings her face up against his.

He screams “It’s me! You goddamn know who I am!” and she thinks she might suffocate in the sludge of alcohol and bacteria on his breath. She kicks out at his shin but the toe of her running shoe is soft and when it strikes, a crack of pain shoots up her leg and disappears into her belly. He grabs her arm again, this time with both hands. Instinctively she winds her body against his pull and with her free arm.

The ring on her middle finger gouges a trench of bright red across the temple and through his eyebrow. One hand releases her arm to clutch at the wound and she levers herself free of the other hand, stumbling as her feet try to find traction on the loose leaves covering the trail. He stumbles too but she’s off and only the sound of his boots scuffing the gravel can catch up to her.

The energy inside her is now an anxious fire that heats up her lungs from below so that she has to drag in each breath against a wall of dead dry air that sops up the moisture from lips and tongue. Her arms make short, choppy arcs, her fists slamming at something insubstantial when they rise and fall. She come to a steep rise in the trail and attacks it, but she has lost the harmony of muscle and air, and when she reaches the top she has to stop for a moment and gulp at the sky.

The trail parallels a park road below and she slides down a shallow dihedral made by rainwater and scrambling children, and runs along the pavement, slack-jawed, past wooden benches where couples are talking and eating lunches, and then out of the park and into the black and noise and metal. Back at the drop in center she’s withdrawn and inattentive. She feels jerkily moved from the outside, attached by strings to that clearing in the park. Each piece of memory that flies past her eyes tightens or loosens a string. Her stomach knots, her fists ball up. She finds herself sighing deeply. Her breath feels like it’s been stolen. Standing up suddenly at her desk she has to reach quickly behind her to keep her chair from crashing over backwards. She snatches up her woven basket of a purse with the lump of wet running clothes at the bottom, and leaves early.

The Eddie Haskell bunker is empty; the dogs are asleep on the almost lawn, even June is gone. Sheila is out in the tipi, drawing something and doesn’t notice Bekka. Still restless and distracted, her attention is a tiny feral beast, poking through eyes, ears, fingers, rooting around for a steadying activity to settle into. She runs water for a bath but at the last minute shies at undressing and instead wraps herself in a crocheted blanket pulled from the sofa in the dim living room. The hardwood floors themselves seem canted like the trail in the park. They shift without warning, tipping her from empty room to empty room, beginning something in the kitchen, fumbling in the hall closet, slumping onto her bed. Finally she sits cross legged on the floor and tries to remember the meditation she learned in college. But the technique only provides a forum for the scattered images from the clearing, which continue to tighten and loosen the strings that animate her. Finally she gets up and finds some relief in a cup of tea held warm between her palms.

At last, she changes into fresh clothes, climbs into her car and drives into the late afternoon. She pretends to herself that she has no particular destination and is even startled when she finds herself on the front porch of the house with the peeling brown paint and the slat-covered windows. Her finger is still pressing the white disk of the door bell when her ex-husband’s face appears at the door, curious, frowning into the bright afternoon. Would she like to come in? Hello, yes, she supposes she would.

She follows him through the hallway like a prospective tenant who can give no references. He leads her across the room to a chair that swims in window light. She lowers herself shyly, all angles, onto the edge of the seat. She feels on stage.

Leaning his body toward the kitchen, he asks if she’d like a beer. Has he got maybe some Tab or something? That’s right, he’d forgotten; she’s still running isn’t she? He doesn’t hear the hesitation that expands suddenly, filling the room, before she says, yes, still running, yes. While she hovers half in, half out of the chair, making little tugging forays with her lips over the brim of the glass into the froth of the Dr. Pepper, he settles himself into the couch opposite with a pad of blank pages and begins to sketch her. She wonders if the drawing will show the strings that control her flitting movements or show the form of the anxiety leeching her intestines like a carnivorous suckling. He isn’t any good at small talk, she remembers.

The white drawing paper soaks up his attention and gradually his body curves around the pad. He is pregnant with the effort. Every few minutes he gives birth. The children sail onto the rug and are abandoned. The silence between them is a great empty recital hall into which she mentally recites her excuses for her uninvited presence. She rehearses the scene in the park but it speeds by too quickly to extract more than the merely elemental: face, motions, outcome. The conceptual glue is missing that would bind these into an event that could be named. And shared.

She chokes off the urge to cry for want of a clear subject. What did happen? Sitting in the pool of afternoon light in the recital hall she thinks of words from headlines and statutes. Rape, molestation, harassment, assault, drunkenness. Carelessness, inattention, stupidity. The corner of her eyes leak. She feigns a yawn to account for the tears. Sketching, somewhere else, he complains to her vaguely about women. It’s a routine of his, an allowed feature in the small plot of ground that remains of their shared landscape. Drawing this scattered presence balanced on the edge of the chair across from him, his pen supplying certainty and form, has put him in good humor. Mistaking the silence of her concealed distress for receptivity, he details his usual frustrations in animated metaphor. His eyes are merry, his voice good natured. He has discovered, he says, clicking the drafting pen against the thick paper, that women are at the root of each of his problems, which, he adds carefully, are legion. He has catalogued his troubles and there is a woman who can be justifiably blamed for each one. He has become convinced, on the basis of strong evidence, that an extremely tiny woman has been living in the Chevy’s engine block and causing havoc with the valve guides. He has strewn half the car around the driveway trying to get at her. Unfortunately he seems only to have succeeded in chasing her into the carburetor where she now prevents a smooth idle.

Abruptly, Bekka stands up, leaving the tiny woman still in hiding and the latest sketch undone. She hands him the empty glass, as beaded with moisture on the outside as the face of an actress under the lights, then turns and wipes the ring of water from the side table with the cuff of her sleeve. Outside, a single bite of peach colored sun is caught in the angle of chimney and rooftop across the street. Standing in the open door, his eyes watch her eyes growing small pears of tears. Would she like to tell him what’s wrong? She looks down. No. Something happened, is all. She just wanted company. She’s alright, she’ll tell him about it some time. She knows he hates that kind of evasion, tries to improve on it in order to erase the intrusion, but winds up stammering. She hears herself talking too loudly. The actress demands better material to work from and she asks, what am I supposed to tell him? That I got off lucky and now I’m crying about it? A press on his hand extricates her from the tangle of his concern and uncertainty, and the clack of the door closing propels her out to the sidewalk where she stands, receptive to the evening scents and noises, condensed earthward by the cooling of the blackboard blue sky.

Heading back over the bridge, a delayed thirst from the run brings her to a bar across the street from the low wall that runs along the west bank of the river. It isn’t a neighborhood bar but a much larger place, where hundreds of seekers gather after work. She orders gin and tonic, quickly cancels the gin and when the glass is set before her, she brutalizes the crescent of lime. Her fingers worry and scrinch the glass, her head is heavy and lopsided, tracking poorly on the rusted bearing in her neck. Crossed, her legs don’t fit neatly under the table so she is half twisted into the crowd, her dangling foot bouncing absently to the tempo of the music coming from a corner somewhere.

Bodies in suits and office dresses occupy space, then evacuate it, organisms that experience transient agglutinations and collisions like the life in a drop of water. These movements form a harmless unpatterned visual noise, and for a while she bathes some of her sharp edges in it. When she leaves through the wood paneled foyer with its yellow lights and brass fixtures, she has to flatten against the wall in the face of a sudden influx of buoyant young men in tuxedos and their florid, rustling dates. The young men stand together and talk with their hands thrust into pants pockets, while the coterie of lavenders and satiny greens gathers nearby, out of the way of rushing waiters.

Outside, the air is crystalizing and the night time scene is developing slowly, like a photograph. The boldest stars compete with the city lights. There are horns, clacking heels, isolated fragments of laughter, couples’ voices around corners. Crossing the street she walks through the clumps of tough park grass, catching the nubs on the soles of her shoes on the thick brown roots, she leans on the wall and looks out into the muddy current. A huge cylinder of dark air floats on the river, calming the surface and separating the lights on the opposite bank. She rests her elbows on the grainy rounded crown of the wall and leans forward until she can feel the surface of the dark cylinder. It is cool and soft and she shrugs and heaves, tries to cry for release, but can only manage swollen wet eyes.

Someone whistles behind her and she turns to face the street. A young girl, made older by makeup and heels, is trolling the sidewalk between street signs. An inverted pyramid of wide-shouldered rabbit fur and pegged jeans, she drags a pickup truck behind her by the beams of its headlights. The cab is stuffed with skinny young men in plaid shirts whose heads bloom in baseball caps. They bob and shift against each other in anticipation. As the truck begins to enter the intersection, the light changes from yellow to red. The driver can’t decide whether to go through or stop, hesitates too long and the truck stalls. There is the image of a fist, stroboscopic beneath the stuttering street lights, slamming against the dashboard, while on the far bank of the intersection the girl has landed a shark-finned boat of a car and is leaning into the open passenger’s window, weighing the catch.

“Aww, man!” The driver of the stalled pickup’s loud complaint has the whining drawn out inflection of a motor boat racing away. She listens to this and wonders if the derelict in the park, having missed his own opportunity, mourned after her similarly, whether he stood beating the trunk of a nearby tree before going back to his bottle.

Her breath catches on a nail. Her legs tighten and her toes curl inside her shoes, trying to clutch at the spot from which she is being moved. All the possible names for what happened on the trail are thin shells into which she had been trying to shoulder the bulk of the event, and now they are bursting, and the event’s reality, frustrating, formless and liquid, is washing around her with a tidal energy. She is left standing on eroding sand, sinking, as the tide pulls at her legs. Soon there is nothing left of the world but the rush of water and disappearing sand and, not that far away, the hollow-eyed man in the park being carried away. All that separates them is a single moment, a mote in time, coming and going faster than can be thought about, but large enough for her to have stepped into. It is the moment in which she might have ridden her fine high energy, trusted it, been protected by it. The moment in which she might have kept her stride and breath and not stumbled over an assumed vulnerability, not hesitated at all but powered right past the pathetic, grasping presence and not been touched.

There is that single moment, abandoned by her assumed vulnerability, her hesitant rhythm, and now that abandoned moment has turned heavy and corrosive. It lies in the outrush of tide still, between her and the lost man, connecting them, a dense, fleshy, placental presence heaving with alcohol on one side, and lost confidence on the other. It is the weight of this half-formed thing that anchors the strings that control her, that attaches her still to the man being swept away alongside her.

In the intersection, the light has turned green and the pickup truck is jerking slowly through it, the engine prodded to a series of mournful yowls by the cursing driver. From across the street, fighting the rushing tide, she sees what the problem must be: there is a very tiny woman crouched inside the truck’s carburetor, plugging up the flow of gasoline. Up the block, the young girl has thrown back the shark-finned car and disappeared around a corner.

From whatever high school prom has caused them to dress in tuxedos and impossible dresses, a dozen boys and girls weave through the flow of traffic, heading for the river. The boys are loud and smiling and full of punches and feints, their dates nearly an afterthought, struggling to keep up in their paper-stiff gowns. As they walk toward her, she is still fighting the tide, but then the light changes and the girls have to run to the curb. Bekka sees that one of the corsages is caught in a short gust of river air and lifted from its perch, falling onto the pavement, a diaphanous angel wrongfully expelled from its miniature tableau.

Through her teary eyes she sees the flower, lustrous against the black of the pavement, and the stream of oncoming headlights, their beams splayed out by her salty sheen of tears into a phalanx of demon-white starfish. Her legs scissor open and she races across the strip of grass. Her open mouth scoops an undulating trail out of the cool air. She is two steps out onto the pavement, ahead of the oncoming traffic and without stopping she reaches down and snatches the corsage from the pavement. There are snapping sounds all around her as wrists and ankles break free of the strings. She pivots in the swirl of the air from the rushing traffic, regains the safety of the grass and passes the flower back to the girl at a dead run. Unbound, her legs lengthen, her stride evens as the strings pop and snap, her footfalls making a luxurient rhythm on the grass, heart and lung moving on the same current. The couples stand and watch curiously as the red-eyed mad woman sprints along the river beneath the moon.