Fiction by Alysha Black
THE RUNNING WOMAN

Nia saw the way everyone looked at her as she wheeled her kids around the grocery store at ten pm, and she hated it. Five months had passed since Peter’s death, and still, all the supposed empathy people lavished on her felt like pity and looked like embarrassment. As in, no matter how sorry everyone seemed to be about her husband’s death, they were at least equally embarrassed by their own good fortunes. Many of the people who had written cards and shown up at her house laden with casseroles and crock pot meals meant well, she knew that; she also suspected that their generosity was at least somewhat motivated by an impulse to appease the gods in charge of living and dying. What better way to safeguard one’s own good fortune than by engaging in the ritualistic exchange of bland food smothered with cheese? Untimely death had its own language, but until you spoke it, you didn’t even know it existed.

Nia added a clamshell of grapes and a bunch of bananas to her shopping cart. Surely she had done something quite bad to warrant being left at thirty-nine with a dead husband and two kids under the age of six. Maybe there was simply no other outcome for a woman who stopped breastfeeding her babies before they left the hospital and who was notorious for skimping on bedtime stories when it was her turn, skipping words, sentences, even whole pages just to get it done. Not to mention all the times she’d come home later than strictly necessary when Peter had a grown-up dinner waiting for them at home.

Now, trying to shop with five-year-old Josh and three-year-old Sylvie nestled among the processed nuggets and off-brand Goldfish while they watched YouTube on her phone, Nia felt an ever-growing list of parenting fails seared into her flesh, a sinewy, unforgettable web of scars polka-dotted with fresh welts. She had taken herself out of the running for partner at her law firm after Peter died, but she was still expected to put in long hours, which meant Josh and Sylvie were the first kids to arrive at preschool for Early Care and the last ones to leave from After Care. Most nights when they got home, Nia had just enough energy to do bath, books, songs, and bed. Or cook. Not both.

“Careful with the bananas,” she told Josh, repositioning them beside his bare, not particularly clean, foot.

Usually, it was men shopping this late at night, and the ones who’d known Peter simply stared their condolences at Nia. He’d been one of their own and for him to drop dead like that, why it simply didn’t make any sense. Women, though, they were the talkers—even if they did do most of it behind her back. This was the only explanation Nia could come up with for why the air around her became thick with silence whenever she walked into a room.

Tonight, Nia took note of the woman spiraling ever closer to her grocery cart. She was at least ten years older than Nia, shorter too, compact, with a frame of gray wispy hairs around her face and a dusting of freckles among the lines that were beginning to take hold along her eyes and jowls. The two of them had met a little more than a year ago over a tray of Rice Krispies Treats at a neighborhood barbecue. It had been hot, the mojitos generously spiked, and when Nia saw her, she’d burst out, “You’re The Running Woman!”—because in Nia’s mind, The Running Woman was practically famous. At least once a day for the previous two years, Nia had watched her plodding across the landscape outside her dining room window.

“And here I’ve been telling myself no one’s paying attention,” the woman had said, flushing in a way that was utterly charming. “Running’s what keeps me sane. Or—Fine. Saner. Please, call me Martha.” Then Martha had pointed out her husband Brian, a tall man with enough hair to count and not too much belly. He was good-looking in a handsome-by-comparison way that some men acquired in midlife.

Later that night, when Nia and Peter were in bed, Nia told him about her conversation with Martha.

“I know Brian from the playground,” Peter said. “His kids are older—the youngest is already in elementary school—but we SAHDs don’t discriminate.” Peter regularly lamented the fact that there were so few stay-at-home dads in the neighborhood. He was always trying to get more of them to hang out with their group on the playground or grab a beer over the weekend. “Funny,” he said, closing his book and turning off the light, “I never would have pegged Martha for a runner. She’s not even in particularly good shape.”

Peter’s comment had annoyed Nia long after she should have fallen asleep, mainly because she’d been thinking the exact same thing. For all that running, Nia would have wanted to be greyhound sleek, and Martha, even on her best days, was more of a pug.

Nia concentrated now on getting out of the grocery store in Ten-Five: spending no more than ten minutes, saying no more than five words. It was a game she’d started playing with herself after Peter died. Unfortunately, Martha was taking an extraordinary interest in cheese, scrutinizing a block of this and rejecting a brick of that, one after another; Nia would have to walk past her to get to the milk.

Nia was just wedging a gallon of milk into the cart behind Sylvie—she was this close to making her escape—when Martha said, “Excuse me.” She was holding a sneaker that looked remarkably like Josh’s, except that Martha’s sneaker was covered with stickers and marker and there was a hole in the sole.

“That’s my shoe,” Josh said. He didn’t even sound surprised.

Balancing the shoe in the palm of her hand, Martha bowed like a fairytale footman. “I thought you looked like the kind of boy who might own such an extraordinary sneaker.” She didn’t even comment on the smell.

With the armor of their grocery carts between them, Martha said to Nia. “I don’t know if you remember me, but…”

“You brought us chicken after Peter died,” Nia said. Sympathy chicken, delivered to the back porch in a cooler. Nia had flung away the tinfoil before she even got inside the house, plunging two fingers into skin so crispy it popped when she broke through. Hunk after hunk of breast meat she tore from the bones and shoveled into her mouth. “It was delicious. Best chicken I ever had.”

“I wish I could take the credit.” And there was the same self-effacing smile Nia remembered from the barbecue. “That was my husband’s doing. He’s the one who—” Suddenly, Martha’s face sagged with embarrassment, and Nia wished she could take back every nice thought she’d ever had about the woman. As if Nia had made it through Peter’s memorial service, through donating his clothes to St. Vincent DePaul, through sleeping in their bed and living in their house and seeing him every fucking day in their children only to have it be some random woman talking about her own husband in the grocery store that broke her.

“Come for dinner,” Martha said, her fingertips grazing the metal rim at the end of Nia’s grocery cart.

There’d been roast potatoes, too, Nia remembered now, with the death chicken. Carrots and onions. Everything so tender it fell apart in her mouth. She hoped she’d written a thank-you note, but there was no telling.

“Any time that works for you,” Martha said.

Nia nestled her nose in Sylvie’s hair. She’d blown the Ten-Five, but if she and the kids left the store now, abandoned whatever else was on the grocery list, and skipped bath time, Nia could read Josh and Sylvie their books and be curled around two king-size pillows, Netflix droning in the background, within Sixty. “That’s very nice of you, but—”

“Next Tuesday,” Martha said. “Or Wednesday. We’ll keep it simple.”

“No.” Nia shook her head.

“Thursday, then. Brian can make chicken.”

Nia tried to remember what Martha did for a living. Something in business or finance, a field where people prided themselves on never hearing the word no. Nia made a modest attempt to look like she appreciated the invitation. “We can’t make it.”

The following week, Nia discovered another roast chicken, this one even more delicious than the first, on her back porch. As much as Nia wanted to be annoyed at Martha’s presumption, she couldn’t manage it. She found Martha’s number in the neighborhood buzz book and, after typing a few sentences into a text about how the food was unnecessary, how she and the kids were fine, thank you very much, Nia backspaced so that only the words “Thank you” remained.

“For what?” Martha texted back, a winky face emoji the only thing that suggested she even knew what Nia was talking about.

More “anonymous” deliveries appeared on Nia’s porch throughout the fall: armloads of fresh-cut zinnias, apples from a local orchard, hearty soups brimming with veggies and brightened with lemon or lime, and, of course, the occasional roast chicken with a rotating cast of sides.

Nia and Peter hadn’t been dating very long when Peter taught Nia the avocado trick. “Yellow for not ripe, brown for overripe, yellow-green for just right,” Peter said, picking off the stem cap and showing her the green-tinged dot hidden underneath. “See?” Then he pulled Nia to his chest, their eyes inches apart, their lips even closer. “Perfect.”

Nia would be home, gutting a perfectly ripe avocado at the exact moment Peter collapsed on the Ultimate Frisbee field. He was already dead when he got here, the doctor told her when she stormed the hospital, the scent of avocado beneath her nails. A heart attack. The words hollowed out the cushiony bits of Nia’s insides. Nothing we could do. She could have sworn she felt her organs bouncing off each other, her intestines bellowing like a car without a muffler. She’d wanted to ask the doctor if Peter would have had the heart attack no matter what, regardless of where he was—at home, say, or on vacation—but she’d been too afraid of the answer to ask. Because Peter wouldn’t even have been playing frisbee if it weren’t for her. She was the one who told him about the new spring league in the park just down the street from their house. He’d loved Ultimate in college and—the memory of how she’d reached over and squeezed the excess flesh around his stomach horrified her now. “Just a wee bicycle tire,” she’d said, trying to be playful, “not a monster truck tire. Still. . .” In encouraging him to exercise, she’d thought she could shield him from the fallout of his sedentary lifestyle, his late-night chips and ice cream habit.

In the early days after Peter’s death, Nia managed well enough. She showered and got the kids to preschool on time; she made meticulous lists of who did what to help out. But then, after about three weeks, all the visits and extra carpool offers stopped, and the stream of casseroles dried up. The socially acceptable timer on Nia’s grief had run out. It didn’t matter that Nia didn’t have siblings or parents who could help or that Peter’s mom lived nearly a thousand miles away in western Canada. She was expected to put Peter behind her just as her own grief exploded.

Those were the days when Nia kept Peter alive in every one of her own inhales and exhales, when any attempt to move on jeopardized her own ability to live. One night, drowning in the insatiable need that oozed from her children like pus, she tucked Josh and Sylvie into bed and left for the 24-hour convenience store on her own. They were asleep, she told herself, they’d be fine. She would pick up a few things for breakfast, some fruit, brioche; she’d make French toast. But when Nia pulled into the store parking lot five minutes from the house, all she wanted to do was keep driving, fast, windows down, her entire body screaming into the wind until the car sputtered and coasted to a stop, empty at last. She’d been so afraid she might do it, too, that she made a hard U-turn in the parking lot and sped home before her yearning for nothingness could overwhelm whatever good sense she had left. All that night, she sat on the edge of her bed, conscious of each toe, the balls of her feet, her heels pressing into the floor. She didn’t start crying until the sun came up, but the tears didn’t stop until late that afternoon when she went to pick up the kids from school and Josh asked her why she was wearing her sunglasses inside.

That’s when Nia started writing. Whole notebooks addressed to her dead husband. Dear Peter, Sylvie chipped her tooth on the monkey bars. . . . Dear Peter, Josh rode his bike to school today, all by himself. . . . Nia relayed every mini-milestone; she didn’t want Peter to miss a thing. Gradually, though, her writing evolved into a kind of conversation with her dead husband that was one-sided only on the page. It turned out that she and the version of Peter who lived in her head were far more connected than she and real-life Peter had been during their last few years together. She certainly talked a lot more to this one.

There was a time, the winter after Peter died, that Nia nearly ran over a jogger as she was backing out of the driveway. It was the flash of neon-green leggings that caught her eye, the accompanying fluorescent yellow jacket. Nia slammed on the brakes. The woman didn’t swear or yell, didn’t so much as shake her head, she just kept running, like maybe she’d expected the near miss, like maybe it happened all the time. For a second, Nia watched the woman’s retreating stub of gray ponytail, how she ran up in the air nearly as much as she ran forward, how—

Nia sprang from the car. “Martha?”

But the woman kept going.

Nia attempted to jog in pursuit, but the effort to push breath through her body scorched her chest. She and Martha weren’t friends exactly—how could you be friends with someone you’d barely ever talked to?—but they weren’t not friends, either. “Marthaaaa!” Nia gasped and fought to keep moving.

When the running woman finally stopped, she turned to face Nia and said what was now all too obvious: “I’m not Martha.” And then she disappeared down the block, leaving Nia with the sense that she’d neglected something important.

Several weeks later, Nia pulled out a pair of running shoes from the back of her closet. The last time she’d worn them, she’d been pregnant with Sylvie, her feet had been too uncomfortable to fit into anything else. It took another few days before she tried them on and another few days after that before she wore them outside and began to run, her languid pace belying the rush of desperation that surged just beneath the surface of her flesh. As her feet thud-thumped on the sidewalk and her brain cascaded down one anxious waterfall after another, she came to relish the point about twenty minutes into her runs when her body hurt so much that the pain was enough to drown out her thoughts. Runner’s high: the glorious moment when, bunions aching, sweat pooling in every crease and fold of her middle-aged body, Nia caught a glimpse of what it used to be like to feel clear-headed.

When Nia saw the sign in Martha’s front yard, it was one of those bright but biting late-March days when sunshine only offered the illusion of warmth and she’d been plodding her way around the neighborhood twice a week for a couple of months. Although the sign was too far away for Nia to make out specific words, she had no problem recognizing the logo of one of the local real estate companies in the blur of blue and white. Similar signs popped up around the neighborhood every spring. Moving more quickly now, Nia jogged up the block and onto Martha’s grass, where she stopped in front of the sign. Coming Soon! Nia’s fingers stiffened in the cold, sweat chilled the back of her neck.

Until this moment, Nia hadn’t given much thought to the why behind her decision to take up running, but it was suddenly clear that Martha was the key to a plan Nia hadn’t known she was making. She lumbered to Martha’s front door. She looked through the plate glass door into Martha’s mostly-empty foyer where the walls were a freshly-painted greige, the wood floors newly-polyurethaned. The house was nice in a completely different way than it must have looked when a smattering of dog toys, sports equipment, laundry, and backpacks lived on the furniture and floors. She thought of Martha’s food and thinking-of-you gifts, her invitations to book clubs and girls nights out that Nia hadn’t even responded to, let alone attended. She’d thought she had more time, that’s all, a ridiculous assumption for a woman whose husband had died when he was forty-two.

Nia rapped on the glass and rang the doorbell. In the last year, a swollenness no amount of running could touch had begun to hug her body and settle into the pockets of fat around her middle. Sleep wrinkles that used to disappear by late morning clung beneath her eyes, ran along her cheeks until—well, Nia wasn’t sure they ever went away. She smoothed her running jacket over her hips, swiped at the rectangle of Vaseline she’d smeared over her lips to keep them from chapping. What she needed to do was apologize. To tell Martha she’d have done things differently if she had them to do again, even if rethinking any part of the last year would be like ripping away her skin to try and find her breath.

Martha rounded the corner from the living room and entered the foyer. The two women locked eyes. On the other side of the glass, Martha smiled exactly the way Nia remembered. She opened the door and pulled Nia in for a hug. “Took you long enough.”

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #50.

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