Hey, guess who's got another story out, and not too long after the last one! That's right, me! I was able to dash this one off pretty quickly, although in part because it's quite short. I can't think of anything in particular that was the inspiration, although the basic idea popped into my head in the parking lot across from our office building when I was heading into work Tuesday morning.

I think the next one might be something kinda of sci-fi-y.

---

The Great Escape

She runs down the hallway, shoes clattering and echoing. It's the second floor of her old high school, which is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. She didn't even go back for her ten year reunion, despite a dozen phone calls from Cynthia, the former class president. Even though she is only one half inch taller than she was when she graduated, everything in the school looks so small. The lockers only come up to her shoulders and she feels as though if she steps too high, she'll crack her head on the ceiling.

She's running, but she isn't being chased. But maybe she is trying to get away.

Something in her peripheral vision drags her to a stop. The school's trophy case is there. She looks it over, up and down, but the old field hockey trophies, the ones her name would be on are long gone. Too old to be kept around anymore. Just like the school should be, far in the past and forgotten. Henry Ford once said that history is bunk, but people misunderstand him. He didn't mean the American Revolution, the Magna Carta or the Moon Landing. He meant your personal history.

She looks at her feet. She's wearing these four inch heels, black with sparkles. Kids shoes for grownups. How was she running in them? She can hardly walk in them under normal circumstances. She kicks them off, picks them up.

Steve had bought them for her. You couldn't really call them a gift.

"Just come on, Jaqueline, please wear them. Just tonight? My mother picked them out."

"Steve, they're hideous."

"Come on, please, for me?"

He'd walked up behind her then, put his arms around her waist and pulled her butt into his crotch. Like that was somehow some kind of recompense for what he was asking.

Jaqueline puts one hand on the wall and picks up her left foot and gives her sole a rub. Then the other foot. She's wearing thin black leggings, and on the right foot her big toe is starting to wear through. Her mother would be aghast.

She picks up the shoes and is about to throw them down the hall but decides she doesn't want to listen to them clatter. Instead, she opens up one of the nearby lockers and places them on the top shelf, both shoes lined up evenly and neatly, as though on display in the store where Steve had found them.

Her feet feel better already. She takes off running again, down the hall, which is longer than she remembers. Her feet don't hurt, running bare on the concrete floor. Instead she feels light and free.

Jaqueline runs down the stairs to her school's main floor, past the cafeteria and the gym. On the way out the back doors — the smokers' doors as they were known — she passes underneath a banner advertising the ten year reunion for the class of her graduating year.

Outside the smokers' doors is the school's running track; still gravel, even after all these years. But instead of the field meeting the parking lot of a shopping mall, Jaqueline sees a broad line of trees. Hanging above the trees is a full moon, so large that she thinks to herself that an ice pack would help with the swelling. There is a smattering of stars that look haphazardly tossed into the sky.

It is a hot and muggy summer night, and Jacqueline feels sweat dribbling between her shoulder-blades and down her spine. She shrugs off her coat, lets it fall to the ground. Looking down, she sees it is the ski jacket she bought for the ski trip she and Markian took a few years back. The jacket was blue and white Gore-tex and cost nearly as much as the tickets to Cuba she'd found in a seat sale online. Jaqueline wanted to go south to warm temperatures and bright colours. But a client of Markian's firm had comped him free passes to the ski lodge. They could spend a week together, and Markian could do a little networking.

What actually happened was that blizzard hammered the mountain they on for the entire five days. Jacqueline expected to spend the week on the slopes and had brought exactly one book — a novel by Thomas King that she was already half finished before they left. They spent the entire time in the hotel's lounge, hardly saying a word to each other. After she finished her novel, she read it again, and then began to work her way through the magazines piled on the tables in the lounge, mostly tabloids and celebrity gossip. Markian spent the five days eyeing the younger women who were also killing time; a large group of high school kids were snowed in along with them. Markian's clients never showed up. The highways were closed before they could make it in.

Jacqueline feels much better with the jacket off. It'd grown heavier in the years since she'd last seen Markian.

She takes off running again, the dewy, cool grass is wonderful on her feet. She crosses the gravel track, runs across the soccer pitch inside the track's oval and then crosses the track on the other side. Jacqueline stops just before the forest. It looks safe to her, but all through her life she was taught that forests weren't somewhere you go running by yourself. Certainly not while barefoot.

Jacqueline looks back toward her old high school. The gym door opens, light and faint music spills out. She can't recognize the song, but it sounds like it's from the 80s and dancey. A silhouette walks out and Jacqueline sees the flash of a match as he lights a cigarette. She pushes some branches out of her way and steps into the woods.

There's a path of sorts, but it's overgrown and the branches are thick. She's constantly plucking twigs from out of her hair. Jaqueline pushes her way deeper into in the forest until she can no longer hear the beat from the bass of the music. Overhead, the branches obscure the sky; she can see only pieces of the gigantic moon, fragments of a shattered china plate.

Jacqueline takes another step and hears a tearing sound. A branch caught her dress and tore a few inches above her hip. The dress is the one she wore to high school graduation.

"You couldn't possibly still fit me, anyhow," she says aloud while putting the dress off over her head, "I was a stick in high school."

She roughly folds the dress and leaves it on a branch. She hadn't even wanted to go to her prom. Her friends had planned on spending the evening in one of their basements, smoking pot and listening to music.

Her mother had insisted she go to her grad, though.

"You'll regret it the rest of your life if you don't go," her mother had said, practically crying.

"No, mom, I really don't think I will."

But she gave in, like she always did to her mother's tears. The dress was hideous because it was a reject, one of the leftovers, bought a week before graduation. Jacqueline spent the evening sitting at a table with her lab partner from chemistry. Her friends were arrested when they lit up a joint in the parking lot of a 7-11 when they went for snacks. Jacqueline wishes desperately she'd been with them.

Her underwear is plain and black; she can't remember where she got it from and decides it can stay. And anyway, she doesn't want to go trudging through a forest naked.

She walks through the forest, trying to be more careful about the branches. She's got a lot of exposed skin and doesn't want to get all scratched up. Also, the trees seem are very dry and Jacqueline feels a little pang of guilt each time she snaps a branch.

The trees thin out, and Jacqueline is in a mall. One of those newer style arcades where all the stores are grouped together in a parking lot. None of the stores have signs or names, and in their windows are clothing and shoes and purses. She keeps on walking, her arms folded over her breasts, although there doesn't seem to be anyone around.

Jacqueline walks until she's nearly run out of stores; beyond them is a vast parking lot. In the distance, she sees the lights of cars on a highway. She pulls open the door of one of the stores and goes in. The store is full of racks of dresses, shirts and sweaters. The mannequins are the kind Jacqueline finds disturbing, the ones that are only a torso. No legs, no head.

She walks to the back of the store and into one of the change-rooms. Hanging there is a threadbare, almost still white, terry-cloth bathrobe. On the floor is a pair of slippers that more or less match the robe.

Jacqueline slips it on, ties it up, and slides her feet into the slippers. She stole the bathrobe from the Marriot Hotel in downtown Vancouver. Although it didn't really feel like stealing. It was just one more thing to pack into her suitcase. She left the pillows. She had been in Vancouver on a business trip and assumes the hotel must have eventually charged the lost robe against her company's account, but if they did, she never heard about it.

The bathrobe is soft, and comfortable, and hers, picked by her. She cinches it tighter around her, walks out of the change-room, and out of the store. The moon is still huge, and pale, and perfect.

4 responses to "Week #26 - The Great Escape "

Ruth wrote: Saturday, 26 Jul 2008 13:54 That was a strange one. :) Some neat dreamlike imagery right from the beginning. I liked the transition of the forest into the mall -- I somehow got a very clear feel of the dark contrast of the branches in the moonlight fading into the echoing mall interior. I'm curious who the guy who came out of the gym was. Since he's the only other person that makes an appearance they seem important. Though a guess silhouette is still an 'almost-person' in dream terms...

Marie wrote: Wednesday, 30 Jul 2008 04:30 The dress is the one she wore to high school graduation. "You couldn't possibly still fit me, anyhow," she says aloud while putting the dress off over her head, "I was a stick in high school." She roughly folds the dress and leaves it on a branch. She hadn't even wanted to go to her prom. Her friends had planned on spending the evening in one of their basements, smoking pot and listening to music. Her mother had insisted she go to her grad, though. "You'll regret it the rest of your life if you don't go," her mother had said, practically crying. "No, mom, I really don't think I will." But she gave in, like she always did to her mother's tears. The dress was hideous because it was a reject, one of the leftovers, bought a week before graduation. Was the dress from Prom or Graduation? Or do you kids call your senior prom graduation in Canada? I've heard of people talking about all of the last months activities "graduation" but it never made a lot of sense to me.

Dana wrote: Wednesday, 30 Jul 2008 10:29 We called the dance after your graduation ceremony "grad", or "graduation", but that might just be a Western Canada thing. I'll have to ask one of my Ontario friends what they call it. I started off calling it "graduation" and then decided to call it prom to make it more clear what I meant. I should perhaps just call it prom to be clear since the story isn't really tied to any particular setting.

Marie wrote: Thursday, 07 Aug 2008 00:43 That makes sense. Here we don't have a dance after graduation. We just have Prom which is usually about a week or a month before graduation. Some places are doing a thing called "Project Graduation" which began to stop so many kids from drunk driving after graduating and getting killed on one of the most important days of their lives, and surely the gateway to adulthood. Not a good day to die. So P.G. is this thing you can sign up for where after the graduation ceremony they put everyone who signed up for it (it's optional, and free to do, paid for by PG donation drives) on buses and take you to an undisclosed location where you're supposed to be locked in for the entire night until they put you back on buses and take you back to campus to get picked up in the wee hours of the morning. The idea is that you're going somewhere without booze, you're not allowed to loiter out front and call friends to meet up with you who could bring booze or take you away, and it's supposed to be really fun. The year I did it they did the same thing they'd done the year before, which is unusual. They took us to an arcade that's a pretty cool place for adults to hang out. Lots of fun games and things. They also had booths set up that were designed to appease the female population who may not have enjoyed the games. They had psychics and manicurists, and booths that were kind of like fair games. This was a ridiculously long post. Anyway, in the U.S. Prom and Graduation are two pretty separate events. Some places have Prom the last week of classes before the graduation ceremony and they kind of consider the whole week and all the events that take part that week to be "grad week." Which is why that didn't quite make sense to me. Was it a dress she wore to the graduation ceremony, or to her Prom? Now I get it. Your way sounds better. Having Prom just post graduation ceremony would be pretty cool, actually.

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