Running Toward Healing

Running Toward Healing

The words sledgehammered the inside of her skull. I’m going to die.

A silhouette had floated through Elise’s bedroom door, stopped above her bed, and hovered there.

One of the silhouette’s hands pressed a knife against her chest. The blade’s tip tickled that perfect place – just to the left of the sternum and in between the fourth and fifth ribs. From here, the blade could ease itself – like a warm knife through butter – straight through her heart.

“Please don’t. I beg you. Please don’t kill me. Please,” Elise screamed into the dark. Oh God, please help me, she shouted to herself, hoping God, or the universe, would hear. Fearing that even if they did, neither could save her.

“I’ll do whatever you want. Anything. Just let me live. Please.” The silhouette’s free hand slapped her cheek and capped her mouth shut - her screams became muffled grunts and squeaks.

Ice cold fear shivered her entire body, now stone cold and taut. She prayed the end would be quick and painless – or as close to these as possible. She closed her eyes and waited for the end of her life to begin.

Out of the corners of her eyes, Elise saw that the knife’s handle and blade were bloody. The silhouette’s hand was bloody too. That’s impossible. He hasn’t stabbed me yet. Or has he and I didn’t feel it? Am I dead and don’t know it?

Panic fired from every nerve. Answers weren’t coming. The fingers holding the knife twitched. The blade pierced her skin.

“Please don’t,” Elise begged. “Please God, help me,” she begged.

Silhouette man ignored her. Would God ignore her too.

Somewhere outside, a dog barked. Silhouette man yanked the knife from her chest and himself off Elise. Gasping and crying, Elisa didn’t notice him flee.

Elise’s watch began singing – coaxing eyelids to part.

She brushed her hands across her chest. They found what they always found these days. A small indentation; one sixteenth of an inch wide and one half an inch long. Unlike a year ago, her hands weren’t warmed and wetted with blood.

A quick cold shower rinsed off the nightmare’s sweat. Elise slipped herself into her running outfit and running shoes, grabbed her keys and phone, inserted her ear buds, and started the playlist named Ten Miles.

“Damn. Almost forgot.” Elise pivoted and grabbed one more thing. The little black book she treated as if her life depended on it. In many ways, her life did depend on that book.

That book contained names and places. Names of everyone who mattered to her and to whom Elise mattered. Places where her parents were killed, then buried. Had the dog barked a few minutes earlier that night, maybe they would still be alive.

The book also contained the address where silhouette man was living on death row.

On the inside of the front cover of the little black book was the list of lottery numbers her parents played once a week every week. Elise smiled and checked to make sure the ten-dollar bill she tucked inside the book was still there. It was.

Ten miles later, Elise stepped into the convenience store a block from her home. She left the ten-dollar bill on the counter, slid the ten-dollar scratcher inside the book and jogged home.

A warm shower rinsed off workout sweat, and she sat down to see if for once, she was a winner. There was one number left to reveal. The last chance on this ticket.

The quarter swept away the film hiding the number – it matched. Elise’s fingers trembled as they guided the quarter over the prize amount.

“Oh my God,” she yelled. The numerals staring back at her added up to twenty thousand dollars.

Five and a half years came and went. Elise ran ten miles each morning of those five and a half years. Twenty thousand miles in all.

Her phone sang. Her eyelids sprang open. There’d be no cold shower to rinse away the nightmare’s sweat. There’d be no hot shower to rinse of a workout’s sweat. Two hours later, Elise slipped her car into a parking spot in the visitor’s lot at the state penitentiary.

She was escorted into a viewing gallery in a quiet, not often visited wing of the prison. She found the seat assigned to her. Behind the curtain that stared back at her, silhouette man was strapped onto a gurney.

The curtain opened. She clutched the little black book as she watched silhouette man suffer the fate he inflicted on her parents and intended to inflict on her.

Still clutching the book, Elise drove to the cemetery where her parents were buried. She stopped at the maintenance shed and confirmed what she’d ordered had arrived.

While Elise talked with her mother and father, the maintenance crew left something at every grave. Turns out twenty thousand dollars is enough to buy twelve hundred bouquets.

After the last two bouquets were placed at Elise’s parents’ graves, she pulled a small trowel from her handbag with her empty hand, dug a small hole between the plots, and buried the little black book.

Driving home, Elise felt the scar on her chest. It was still there.

But the scar on her heart was gone.

As would be the nightmare.