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Show my efforts in my mind more often than on a scale, but knowing the numbers. October was the perfect season for running, the trees turning lean, the sidewalks covered in summer's end. Six miles. Six days a week. I knew every crack in the sidewalk. It was dark enough and I was deep enough into my run that at first I didn't see him. Several blocks from my house, on a typically busy neighborhood street near campus, he stepped out from the edge of my route, naked and masked and beating off We were alone on the still-wet streets. At my jump, my tiny cry, he laughed and followed me with his nakedness, brandishing his erect penis like a sword. I turned and sprinted all the way home, only thinking later how right my dad had been about trusting my legs to carry me from danger. Not until I had showered and walked to campus did I think to call the police. The officer said he was harmless and I should not even take the time to make out a report. Men like that are rarely violent, she said on the phone. Something in her tone of voice, the disapproval I sensed for calling, made me feel weak and small. Rather than lose the routine of my running route, the hills and turns my feet knew by heart, I chose to believe the police and kept to the same path. My heart raced, though, every time I passed the place where he had stood. For months I did not see him, the winter too cold for nakedness. On days when I had to run the track because of the weather, I missed the scenery of the natural world but felt safer. Outside, I had taken to carrying my keys like tiny knives, switching them back and forth between my hands; their heft and my ability to outrun the world brought me comfort as I passed bushes, shadows, and side streets. With daylight savings, warmer weather, and the tulips, though, he appeared again, stepping out of the fog, closer this 229 |