WHEN THE RAVEN BOYS GO RUNNING
(@creampulse hope you enjoy!)
I. Noah takes off running in the middle of the night. It’s not really running, and he’s not really Noah, so he can breathe hard and feel vaguely the pavement beneath him, but he’s all energy and no sweat, all starlight and no substance. He remembers running in the time Before, when the world was sharper and his hands were real hands. Back then if he went fast enough he felt like he’d grown wings, like he was an angel burst into flight, for a moment a thing ethereal and glowing in the ache of exertion, but now he felt a little angel-like all the time, and so there was no novelty in being above the ground anymore.
He turns off the streets and into dirt roads, slows down here, lingers among the pebbles and the tree roots and the dust that does not rise with his steps. He’s in an area of scanty houses that hunch in the shadows of pine trees like sick bodies looking for a cure. An old place, a place of buried bones, a place that reminds him of himself.
He looks up at the moon. She’s soft tonight, a slivered thing, and he thinks, At least She is as sleepless as I am. There was a time once where he had worshipped Her. He and Whelk built an altar in Whelk’s backyard under the oak tree out of a filched china bowl and one of Noah’s mother’s lilac-scented Yankee candles. They offered up smooshed hunks of raw hamburger meat. Whelk was shrapnel even then, prayed for something about bloodshed. Noah still remembers what he himself prayed in jest, drunk on the dark and heat of summer, word for word, Oh Artemis, make me immortal. That one small wish. Just that.
He wonders if he should pray to Her again, tell Her he wants to take the wish back. His heart misses being a heart and his hands miss being hands.
II. When Adam was younger he used to go running on the backroads in sneakers with holes in the toes and soles that flapped, in thrift-store ripped-up cargo shorts and thrift-store t-shirts always a size too big. Once, in elementary school, he’d won a sprint race, and afterwards his teacher had given him for the prize a moon pie and an RC cola. The taste of them both, so sweet, still haunted his dreams sometimes, along with images of his father fly-fishing in the creek with a real smile on his face, and his mother baking cornbread in the kitchen Saturday mornings, humming bluegrass tunes her mother had taught her. These memories that rest like dead bodies inside him, another time, another place that he didn’t feel like he could ever return to, gone and forever-gone.
But sometimes when his lonesome heart gets heavy, he goes running through Cabeswater. Barefoot, the grass soft under his feet, with the birch trees and their black eyes cheering him on. He can ask the wind to swirl, easy and slow. He can ask the rivers to give him a clean drink when he tires. And he can feel the magic everywhere around him, his magic, and it’s safe here, and quiet, and it almost feels like a home.
He stops for air in a thicket of trees and rests against one of the maple trunks, lungs aching. Sweat clings to every inch of his chest, is cooling on his arms, is dripping down into his eyes. He looks up at the dawn-light bleeding through the canopies and even though the woods are whispering, Stay a little longer, there’s a real home to which he needs to get back.
III. Gansey used to run with the rowing crew, every Monday through Friday, in spandex tights through the fog-stained cold of mornings. It was a wondrous sort of comradery, all the boys jostling each other with their elbows and cracking jokes that would send them everyone into fits of laughter even when they were pushing themselves hard and gasping for air.
Sometimes, after long sleepless nights when his head aches but the rest of him still won’t slow, he changes into soft shorts and runs through the empty morning streets, past Monmouth, down into the town’s heart, which is really just Nino’s, a post office, a laundromat, a few haggard buildings with black windows. Mostly the streets are clear, and so it helps to clear him up too. He counts his steps methodically as he goes down the sidewalk, one two three four, five six seven eight, his chest opened up and skin cold and hot all at once, until he reaches a hundred and stars again. Nice and methodical.
There are moments in running where he thinks about Glendower, because in everything he does now there is the quiet ghost of Glendower trailing behind him. The greenness of the Welsh hills that he ran through in earlier expeditions, so different from the blue mountains here, but the fog’s still the same, he thinks with a smile, and so he imagines Glendower running through the mist. When he wakes, will he marvel at the wildness of the Henrietta skyline too?
IV. Ronan doesn’t run, he only sprints. There was a time where he used to practice running up and down the Barnes driveway, but it was a long time ago, when his father would watch him with laughing approval and Matthew, still a tiny, toddling dream-child, would try to chase after him, even though he was too small to catch up. Now Ronan had his cars, the hush and roar of them, the slick hot speed of them, and there was no sort of running that could compare to the noise of tires leaving marks on pavement.
But occasionally sprinting comes close. He only sprints when anger burns inside him like a pyre and none of anyone else’s pleadings can unclench his fists. Up and down the Monmouth parking lot with only small breathers in between, over and over, the sweat cloying and evaporating from him until his soul cools too. There used to be just harshness to it, but now Chainsaw perches herself on the hood of the BMW to watch him, and it helps. If he hadn’t known Chainsaw bloomed from the thickets of his dreams, he would think her, in all her black feathers and softness, to be his Guardian Angel, some small-piece of God-sent holiness to sooth the tidal waves of himself.
He makes one last back-and-forth. The afternoon sun is hot and he can feel the sunburn already brewing on his neck and arms, but he is slower now, and steadied, and Chainsaw is singing, so this will be enough.
He breathes in deep, looks up at the sky. Next time around, he tells God with a smirk, you should make angels look like ravens instead of people.
