Brian Campo (briancampo) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-08-27 17:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | brian campo |
Solitude
Who: Brian
What: Running
When: Present
Where: Searchlight
Ratings: Low
Running hadn’t come easy to him.
When Brian was young, a chain link fence circled the field where kids at the local school played kickball or softball. It was roughly a quarter-mile distance around the perimeter of the fence. Running it was a punishment; you ran it once a year to check a box on an administrator’s clipboard or you ran it because you were late getting into your regulation P.E. shorts. Laps were prescribed in doses of four or eight. For a kid whose primary exercise was skateboarding, it was a hellscape.
Once in a while, he would lift a half-empty pack of smokes from his dad’s truck and make himself late on purpose. He tucked the pack into the elastic waistband of his shorts and, waving in the general direction of his teacher’s whistle (‘yeah yeah I’m going’), he began to run. If he timed it right, he could stop behind the dugouts and no one would notice if it took him two extra minutes to appear on the other side. It was a decent place to make out, too. Or so he noticed among the crowd who didn’t play piano for fun.
For a long time, far into his adulthood, Brian associated running with those memories: aching quads, lungs aflame, sweat gluing his hair to his forehead, brief interludes with a Newport, and solitude. Nothing that had any place in his life full of music.
Then he was bitten and all the noise changed. Where there had been a symphony of urban traffic and pounding speakers, he heard only the howl of packmates on the loose, the growl of heavy equipment, the shouts of disagreements that started out in jest and turned into brawls. The walls of the old farmhouse kept closing in on him. All because of a bullet he fired at a wolf on a camping trip, thinking it was a threat to his dad. Because of Kasey’s teeth, Kasey’s rage when that bullet grazed her packmate, a bullet that was neither silver nor anywhere near the wolf’s major organs. She was just that pissed about it. The Alpha came for Brian when he survived, needing warm bodies, reinforcements for a dying pack that lived out of sync with the rest of the species. It didn’t take Brian long to realize he wouldn’t make it on his own, so he agreed to put his life on hold, pack up, and go. The marketing pitch didn’t mention the close quarters.
During those four years in the Appalachian mountains, Brian was surprised to find that what he missed more than anything was solitude.
Proposing a long-distance run to any group of ordinary people was a good way to guarantee you had limited company. He bought a pair of running shoes and started putting in mile after mile on the narrow roads that cut through the hills where New Jersey was almost another state. The farther he ran, the closer he got to autopilot. It was the only time when his mind was perfectly calm.
Of all the things Brian took away from that farm when his Alpha died - painful and extraordinary in equal measure - running was his favorite.
Now, a few thousand miles away, the werewolf loaded music into his ears and ran for hours at night, once the desert cooled down. He stopped to pour water down his throat and over his face, to eat, to skim through a text message or two, or stretch a hamstring, and he was gone again. The thud of his shoes on the pavement was a drum pedal. His respiration was a bass guitar.
On those long runs, he didn’t think about a bartender not showing up for a shift, the slow leak in his back tire, or the booking agent who owed the Spirals a few grand. He didn’t worry about what Nesryn told him about her family, or the eerie quiet of nobody coming to question him about that werewolf he’d wounded in the hills. He didn’t even think about Kasey.
[Adapted from Plainsite]