Running for Peace

“Shoes,” Paul says to himself. “Keys. Breath.”

The house is quiet the way a freezer is quiet. His mother calls from the kitchen, not looking up from her phone. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Wherever the road goes.”

“Don’t be poetic,” his father mutters behind the paper.

“Fine. Nowhere,” Paul says, and the door shuts behind him like a judge’s gavel.

Cold meets him on the porch; it smells like metal and something clean. He starts down the street, past the split mailbox with the faded name, past the dog that always has opinions at this hour. Asphalt gives way to gravel, gravel to dirt, dirt to the back road that runs between cornfields like a seam. He wants to say something brave to the sky, but his lungs are busy.

At mile three he passes old Mr. Harkness by the fence, a rake in his hands and a cigarette that never seems to go out.

“You run like you’re late,” Harkness calls.

“I am.”

“Late for what?”

“Everything,” Paul says, and keeps the rhythm.

At school Coach Diaz traps him at the water fountain. “You’re in my P.E. class, yeah? The kid with the shoes older than the guidance counselor’s advice.”

“I run for me,” Paul says.

“Run for air, then,” Diaz says. “Meet me after last bell.”

“I can’t. Job.”

“You have a job?” Diaz asks.

“Keeping my head on straight,” Paul says.

After last bell he ends up at the diner anyway, because the owner lets him sit with homework and a glass of water that becomes coffee when he turns seventeen and keeps forgetting to bring cash. The waitress with the floral apron slides a mug his way.

“Coffee?” she asks.

“I’m seventeen,” he says.

“Still coffee,” she says, and winks.

A girl wheels her bike in and hooks it to the chair opposite him. “You always run in here,” she says.

“I run everywhere,” Paul says. “I’m Paul.”

“Louise,” she says. “Like the month.”

“Like summer,” he says.

“Don’t be poetic,” she says, but she smiles.

They make a map out of napkins. She draws roads like veins. He marks where the wind shifts, where dogs bark, where light takes its time. She circles the county line in pen.

“You ever cross it?” she asks.

“Once,” he says. “Felt like cheating on my zip code.”

“Cheat more,” Louise says. “What do you run from?”

“The house,” he says, surprising himself. “Everything inside it.”

“What do you run to?”

He looks at her fingers stained with pen ink. “This.”

“Coffee?”

“People,” he says. “And the parts of me that don’t get called dramatic for wanting things.”

At home that night his father asks without looking up, “Track tryouts?”

“No.”

“You think you’re special,” his mother says, stacking plates with the care she never uses on her words.

“I think I’m tired,” he says.

“Of what?” his father asks.

“Answering questions no one hears,” Paul says.

He runs in the dark, the town reduced to breathing and porchlights. He passes the 24-hour gas station and goes in for water. The clerk slides the key on a hubcap across the counter.

“You want water or a reason?” the clerk asks.

“Both,” Paul says.

Outside, the streetlight hums like a secret. Paul tips his head back and stares into it until stars bloom.

At school Coach Diaz tracks him down again. “You’re wasting your stride,” Diaz says, walking backward beside him in the hallway.

“I’m using it,” Paul says.

“You like to run alone because no one can read your face when you’re moving. Try a race. You’ll find someone whose feet sound like yours.”

Paul peels off a flyer later and shoves it in his backpack like contraband.

On Saturdays he pushes farther: farms with red barns like exclamation points, silos like old astronauts, a pond that freezes in an oval where ducks scratch their question marks. He narrates to himself. “Left at the field. Right at the oak. Up the hill, down the breath.”

Sometimes Louise bikes beside him. Her bell pings. “You ever stop?”

“Sometimes I pretend a stop sign is a suggestion.”

“Most of them are,” she says. “What do you want, Paul?”

“A door I can close without being punished for it. Someone who knocks.”

“Knock,” she says, and raps her knuckles lightly on his shoulder. “Anyone home?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I’m out.”

“Out where?”

“Wherever the road goes,” he says. She hoots like a bird.

On a bad day, the house is colder than the outside. His mother stands at the sink, eyes on nothing. “Don’t be late. People will talk.”

“They’ll talk either way,” Paul says.

His father folds a shirt without looking at it. “We did our best.”

Paul almost laughs. “Your best missed the driveway.”

He runs until his breath feels like it belongs to someone brave. At mile eight, Mr. Harkness is there again, leaning on the fence.

“You running toward love or away from trouble?” Harkness asks.

“Yes,” Paul says.

Harkness grins around his cigarette. “Sounds about right.”

He shows up to the race because Louise steals his flyer and writes “GO” on it in block letters. The morning is crisp, the starting line crowded with legs shaped by different kinds of hunger. Coach Diaz finds him in the pack, slaps his shoulder. “Find a pair of feet you like the sound of. Stick to them.”

“You give weird advice,” Paul says.

“It works,” Diaz says.

The gun pops and the road opens. He runs, hears a rhythm ahead that clicks with his own. A tall kid with a floppy haircut. “You going to hang back there all day?” the kid says, half turning.

“You going to make me chase you?” Paul says.

“Maybe,” the kid says, laughing like he has extra air. “I’m Reed.”

“Paul.”

“Nice to meet you, ghost,” Reed says. “Let’s haunt this thing.”

They run side by side. It’s not easy, but it’s not lonely. The last hill is an argument. At the top, Paul hears Louise on the sideline. “Door!” she yells. “Knock!”

He knocks, he enters. He doesn’t win. He doesn’t have to. At the finish Louise throws an arm around his shoulders and Reed wheezes, grinning.

“You’re fast for someone always leaving,” Reed says.

“I’m practicing arriving,” Paul says.

After, in the diner, Louise stirs sugar into his coffee like it’s a spell. “You know love isn’t a finish line, right?”

“Then what is it?”

“A pace,” she says. “Someone you can match without losing your breath.”

At home he sets his shoes by the door neatly, a promise instead of an escape plan. His mother watches. “You think running will fix you?”

“I don’t think I’m broken,” he says.

His father’s laugh is a small, sharp thing. “You’re soft.”

“I’m tired of being hard so you don’t have to be,” Paul says, and his voice doesn’t shake. The room tilts. He feels the old instinct to flee, to slide under silence like a locked door.

He pulls out a letter instead -- community college acceptance, with a note scrawled by Coach Diaz: Scholarships possible. Come see me.

His mother squints. “You didn’t tell us.”

“You didn’t ask,” he says.

He runs that evening to the county line, stops on the painted border, and calls Louise.

“How far?” she asks.

“Four miles to your laugh,” he says.

“Don’t be poetic,” she says, but she’s laughing. “I’ll meet you halfway.”

Her bike light blooms down the road. When she reaches him, she doesn’t say anything at first. They stand with their breath making ghosts.

“I want to belong to my life,” Paul says finally.

“Then let it belong to you back,” Louise says. “No one can love you through a wall you’re still building.”

“I’m taking out a window,” he says.

“Big one?” she asks.

“Enough to crawl through,” he says.

She tips her head. “Okay. Crawl through.”

They move together, her bell marking time, his feet spelling out a language the town never taught him. They pass Harkness, who raises his cigarette in a salute.

“Where you two going?” he calls.

“Wherever the road goes,” Paul says.

“And?” Harkness prods.

“And somewhere worth arriving,” Paul adds.

By summer he’s leading a small pack down the back roads in the evenings -- Reed, a girl from chemistry named Alina, even Coach once, panting and pretending not to. They talk in fragments between breaths.

“Ever think love is just -- ” Reed gasps.

“ -- staying long enough to see someone’s bad jokes?” Alina says.

“ -- sharing the water bottle even when it’s warm,” Paul says.

Louise rides alongside, dinging her bell at intersections like a conductor.

On nights when the house goes quiet like a storm that changed its mind, Paul sits on his porch lacing shoes he bought with his own money. He texts Louise: You home?

She replies: Knock.

He knocks on his own chest, laughs, and starts running. The town is the same, but the air has changed. Somewhere behind him a window opens. Somewhere ahead, footsteps fall into pace with his. He doesn’t speed up or slow down. He runs like someone who knows where he’s going and who wants to be there when he arrives.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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