Running From Home
The tires of vehicles, spun by overly cautious drivers braving the unplowed streets, had cut striations into the hardened snow on the road. He used the grooves as a suggestion for his routing, and as he ran he imagined what the revenge would look like on his reversal, at the places where his footprints exacted justice upon the crisscrossing sets of lines for cutting their parallel audacities into nature’s flat sheet of white flaky toss-downs.
The dense suburban sprawl rolled with medium families in miniature houses and small hills and sidewalk-parking. The houses glowed and bubbled with light and gatherings from the inside, while their outsides blinked with lines of candy-colored illuminations strung expertly along gutters, bushes, and thresholds: just as the tire-tracks, another mark of men.
He turned around at a cul-de-sac, thus creating the midpoint. In the spaces between songs in his ears, the only sound to be heard was his breathing and the only motions to be seen outside of the endless stream of houses were his gloved hands and the warm steam of his exhalations. Like a bundled pink dragon he threatened to breathe fire with each striding rhythm, and turn to water each new territory of imperfect frost that appeared in front of him on the yuletide journey home.