The Runaway

No.457 in 'A Story a Day for a Year - and then some!' (I am behind with my reading here... will catch up this week!)

THE RUNAWAY

First time I ran away I was maybe six or seven. Knee-high to a duck is what my mam woulda said. The road was hard under my feet and being so hard I saw I’d forgotten to put on shoes. I walked by the side of the road then, in the cool wet grass, far enough off and with my head bent and my hood up so I could not be seen by cars passing. It was early and the sun was just coming back to the sky and the cars still had their lights on and the day looked like it might be friendly.

I’d packed a bag of things I didn’t want to leave behind. Books and my favourite cup and a toy that was special to me because it smelled still of my mam when I pressed it over my mouth and my nose. The bag was a weight on my back. Biscuits, I’d packed too, and a glass bottle of orange juice with a green foil top and I hoped the bottle would stay upright and not leak. The lady at the home, she might miss me, I thought, but I didn’t think no one else would.

And just when I was thinking that and feeling all alone in the world – which is different from feeling lonely – that’s when I saw it. In the road and laid out flat and ragged crows trying to unpick it from the surface. It was a fox and it was a bloody mess, all its bones crushed and its pink insides turned outside. Only its head still had some shape to it, the black leather snub of its nose and the red of its snout and its white bearded chin and one eye glinting like a special coin.

I shooed away the crows and they bounced like torn balls away and looked at me as though I was the one that had done something wrong. I sucked in air and started to cry. Right down to my boots, my mam would have said of that crying if she was not dead and buried in a hole in the ground in the churchyard.

I felt sorry for that fox and I didn’t want it to be laying in the road with a hundred cars driving over it, or even a thousand. And not just cars, but trucks and buses, and tractors maybe, with wheels the size of garden sheds. So I did what the crows were doing before and I unpeeled the dead fox from the road and pulled it by the bush of its tail into the grass, saying sorry and sorry and sorry over and over.

I crouched down by the side of the road and dug a hole then, as much of a hole as I could with a broken bit of stick and a sharp stone, dug till my arms were sore and heavy as sleep; dug it deep enough it could take the fox all curled up with its tail laid over it like a rough blanket and one of my favourite books put beside it. Then I covered it over and dragged a heavy rock on top. I kneeled down then and said prayers, like they did when they were burying mam.

The lady at the home was the only person that afterwards believed me and she held me to her, tight as no breath, and she cried and she said I was a dear and she said I was never to run away again, not even to bury no fox or no rabbit or any other creature besides. And she said what would my mam think if she knew. And I know mam don’t think nothing cos she’s dead, so I run away from time to time and I think that’s ok.