Night Running | Charlotte Hamrick

On a late, empty-armed night in a smoke-filled boozy room, I heard your sisters talking about the night you ran away from home, sneaking out your bedroom window and shimmying down the almond tree, cuss words bubbling and popping like water droplets in a hot iron skillet.

As a young mother, you ran again in an impetuous rage down a pine sheltered Mississippi dirt road as startled gravel bit the soles of your fish belly feet. Your fury kicked up dust that glittered like thousands of shards of intent into the night sky, the static in the words streaming out of your mouth raising the hair on my outcast arms. I swore then that I’d never be like you, someone who ran from need, empty arms deliberately folded.

It must be in our blood, the urge to run. An impulse embedded in our DNA bursting like shooting stars across endless generations of night running. When my night came the dark blood surged in my head, the genetic memory of countless footsteps before mine pounded in my throat, the past swirling like trapped molten mantle between Earth and oblivion - as though I had no power in the choosing.

And that is finally, finally, what secured my roots-envied feet to the ground.

Charlotte Hamrick’s creative writing and photography has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies, recently including Still: The Journal, JMWW, Bending Genres, and New World Writing. Her fiction was selected for the Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology and she was a Finalist for Micro Madness 2020. She loves the smell of pine trees in the rain.