Last Few Steps

He ran through the night hoping that peace would come with the new amber light across the horizon. His aching feet, weary back, and tangled mind drove him forward despite their fatigues and sufferings. When the end of this sprint comes, he thought, then rest with it. He labored on with no knowledge of time or distance. His only constant was the vague idea that when it was time to stop he would know. The sun would tell him.

He passed a dead squirrel on the roadside and thought for a moment of stopping. The creature should have a proper place to rest even after death, he thought. His body screamed an incoherent mess at him and he continued on. Any stop would be the only stop. To stop for this dead animal would signal his end. Soon the squirrel was miles behind him to be buried by some other straggler with more time and less pain.

The vultures had gathered above him several days prior, though it may have been a month... he had lost count in the dark, truth be told. They knew what he had steeled himself against in blunt denial: soon he would fall to rise no more. He ached to curse the birds, but his mouth had gone dry long ago. No words could escape. No vibrations through the throat. His cords may have fused together in all this time. Some days he welcomed the scavenging bastards as the only constant in his life. Others he dreamed of leaping on their backs, tearing their feathers, and biting from the flesh of their necks. Always, he continued on in spite of them.

A morning came, the sun peeked through, and he thought for sure that the time had come. He would stop. He would stand in place ready to collapse, look to his left and right, and see places of rest waiting for him on either side waiting only for him. The sun continued to rise sending first pastels across the juncture of sky and land, then rich vivid oranges, and soon the whole sky an endless blue. He longed to stop. His body convulsed. His head throbbed. He could not stop. No place of rest appeared either. Until he saw such a place he would find no rest and his body did not know how to rest on its own. So he continued on.

And he ran. And the vultures circled on. And his mangled mind screamed incoherently through the blue.