Thirty-seven
Mary didn’t know where she was going or when she was going to go back, but she needed to drive. Her mind was void of thought as she sped over the road, traveling faster than she had in a very long time, feeling the thrill of the velocity find its way through her body, into her fingertips, into her legs. She felt the Blazer strain with the burden of it, but it was soothing, that rush of motion.
She hadn’t spoken another word to Hannah before she left. She had grabbed her bag and flew from their apartment, her hair waving behind her as she took the stairs. She pushed the door open and let it slam back against the wall, metal to brick, and then close again. She wasn’t trying to hide now. She didn’t care if she was seen. She started the car and screeched out of the parking lot, passing the kids at the grocery store who were still out back smoking weed. They would laugh as they watched her speed away. Shit! You in a rush?
At first, Mary didn’t think at all. Didn’t think of Hannah or Stefan or Jake. She just drove. Every so often she’d rub her eyes with her closed fist to tamp out the fatigue, but she drove until her mind emptied, as if with a tide. She drove until it filled up again with something quiet and dark. Until it filled again with the swamp. It was of the still water reflecting the earth above it that she thought. It was of the place where sky was land and land was sky. She saw it through eyes that were not her own. And in that way, she wasn’t thinking at all. She saw the movement of every snake in the water, the darting path of every animal. She saw the swamp from beneath the brush and from a perch in the branches of a tree. She saw the strange and lovely flowers open up to draw in flies, then close again, their delicate teeth like crisscrossing briars. She saw heat and coolness and the lovely white gray moss dripping from the trees it shrouded.
She felt herself running, placing each footstep, darting between the cypresses, feeling the brush against her coat. She felt the ancient instinct for motion, for sensing it, the instinct that had kept her alive for hundreds of thousands of years. That had fed her. It was primal, her rush toward the small brown body. It was food. She watched its hind legs pedal in unison to race away from her, watched its small white tail point to the invisible sky. Her need for it was her beginning and end. In her chest, her heart pumped savagely. When she had nearly reached it, she opened her mouth. “Bunny,” she whispered.
And suddenly, she was back. She saw the curve of the road in front of her and the cliff to her left, and she cut the wheel. But the lights from the car behind her shone so brightly in her rearview that they filled her eyes, that they blinded her. She tried to follow the road, to turn in the other direction, but the road was no longer there. She never let go of the wheel even when the car left the earth, when the wheels spun not on asphalt but air. But suddenly, she could see everything all around her. She could see beyond time. And that feeling of motion when the car was in freefall, when it was in its glorious descent to the hungry sea that was the end—well, that was bliss.