Ripping this with little care for its origin, I'm posting it here because I like it. And want you to like it. Do you like it? Do you? Check the appropriate box if you do. See the box? It's there, just below the invisible gila monster still gnawing my arm to bits.
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(Here's the original. Don't bother visiting. It's more plump with words but certainly no more satisfying.)
There was a girl who wanted to begin running. She would examine her eyes and her pimples and her yellowing teeth and she would run her tongue over the teeth and not the pimples though she would wish she could run her tongue over those, only they were on her neck, and thus a physical impossibility, but it didn't undercut her longing to do so, and she would superimpose the her-running over the her-teeth-licking. She, in cold, in rain, hair frizzled and grizzled, clothes flumping about her form, her awkward stomps, her breath bulleting out of her through all the places on her face that it could get free, even her eyes a little. Shorts sticking to her butt and pulling up between her thighs, her right fist sweating in its tightened ball of fury, her left hand open, dry, fresh, and free. Her right fist so angry, so resentful. Her left hand so happy to be bounced along with the rest of her.
The trees would whisper to her as she ran beneath them, some of them trying to hang onto her as she passed beneath, because they saw her, they really saw her and they knew she was something. They knew she could be their savior, but she resisted their thin-fingered grasps, ignored their imploring scrabbles, ducked. Sometimes they'd leave a gift of themselves nesting in the crown of her hair. It itched.
She ran on, in her mind, and the grass ran alongside her, it sang out, its mouth wet, glistening. She laughed. She knew the grass wanted to run with her always. She could hear the grass when it began to cry because she would not slow for it, not ever.
The cement did not care where she ran. And she did not ask it to.
The sky, the sky sent down little alarms, little bits of itself, it wanted to reassure her, and she, without looking up, told the sky in puffs and wreathes of breath, impulsively, that she would return the favor. When the time was right. It wasn't now. They were in on it, the sky and she, and they were gangsters. Pistolas loaded with words, with breath, with mouths wet, with explosions. Surprises.
The run itself spoke as she went, in a wavering line, it told her secrets, it told her of history and of future and of all things, of her crotch being itchy from the shorts as they rode up, of orgasms that shorts do not give, of hair falling into faces and ears that hear the organic arms of the world around speaking in a cacophony and of crickets, frogs, blossoms, dog turds, and squirrels who pin their paws to their chests in frozen stillness.
And then she crawled into her bed, fresh from the bathroom and the teeth-licking run.
