The Gravesavers by Sheree Fitch

Author:Sheree Fitch [Fitch, Sheree]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, Mystery, Young Adult, Adventure
ISBN: 9780770429607
Publisher: Seal Books
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

— RUNNING THOUGHTS —

“Why do you like running?” Max asked me.

“I’m in training.”

“But why do you like it?”

I shrugged and ran off.

It seemed to me he was asking me about more than running. It was the way he looked, serious like a professor pondering over “the many quandaries of the world,” as Harv would say. The unanswerable questions, he meant by that, of which there were more than answered ones. I had a list yay long of my own.

As for the running, the answer was easy enough on mornings when the sun shone down with just enough heat to warm my shoulders and the breeze blew just enough to keep me cool and my legs felt strong and fast, as if they’d fly beneath me forever. I loved kicking up a dust storm behind me on those roads. I imagined myself a young, wild horse that no one could tame.

It was the way the air felt, too. Not just the air blowing around me. It was the sharpness of it— peppermint cool—inside me as I breathed. I sucked that air like drinking pure water straight from a well. And that feeling in my chest as my diaphragm contracted, filling me up with that air. Sometimes, as I ran, I pictured this little army of window cleaners moving through my body, scrubbing it clean with that air after a thick fog of night’s sleep had settled in my bones and muscles. It was a wake-up call for the blood to start circulating and my muscles to start moving.

Running gave me a feeling of power. There was no doubt of that. I felt strong, not just on the outside, in my legs and my arms, but I felt strong inside too, as if in running harder and faster, climbing one more steep hill, I could convince myself that I was strong enough to face almost anything in life. Then there was the other way my body felt at certain moments—like my body dropped away and I was the wind. I was the road and the sky and the grass and the sea and everything.

“I love running,” I should have told him, “because I disappear. I am no longer who I am, but a wisp of wind, a flower dancing its petals in the early-morning breeze, a cloud shifting before your eyes. Weightless. A spirit. Like … my sister.”

Not that I’d ever tell him that. Not that I’d likely have a chance. For a few days, I only saw him in the distance, always going the other way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.