The old dog laid down on the porch, his nose was dry and eyes marbled white. Darlene came out of the doorway, her knees were dirty and still pudgy from baby fat. The kids in the neighborhood would run up and down the dirt street in races that could last a summer day.
She had gone in for some milk and saw Gill and Rodger tearing down the street in the Oklahoma sun. Vapor trails of dust followed them and their thin, razor legs.
“Go Rodger! Run faster Gill.” She called to them and walked to join the other ten kids at the starting line.
Honesty was the rule, no one but the racers knew who finished first because it was too much to walk down to the finish line at each race. Not once had there been a serious argument.
Darlene stood at the starting line to go next, Phillip redrew it with a drag of the foot in the dry, sunbaked dirt. Maggie stepped up. Her blond curls made it look like a lit candlestick was flying down the street each time she raced.
“May the fastest girl win.” Said Phillip and dropped his hand.
The two shot off like rockets, full speed, oxygen’s burning heave welling in their tanks. The rubber bands of the legs could run for days, but they must snap quicker than the opposition if you wanted to win. Maggie wanted to win.
Darlene was heavier than Maggie and not so thin, but momentum is your friend when your legs get tired. Now they pasted the halfway mark, Darlene saw her old dog laying as he always does, marking which of the identical houses was hers.
Darlene felt the victory slipping as her feet began to flop like a clown. Maggie would win again, leaving Darlene the only one of the kids to have never won a race.
There was the end of the street, marked only with a red stop sign. Without that, the road might never end. Endless plains of dust and cracked mud stretched on to the curving horizon. Darlene often daydreamed of shedding off her weight and speeding through the stop sign, kicking up plumes of brown lifeless topsoil. The others would run to the end of the street and hang their mouths open with surprise and jealousy.
But now she would not win, Maggie had already paced ahead by a whole body length and the stop sign was beginning to be legible.
Then as her legs slowed and vision could focus she saw the approaching clouds. Heavy and saturated with rain, a destroyer of summer days. But behind, following on the ground was another cloud, something she’d never seen before. Behind her, Charlie’s deep, gravel bark sounded from her porch.
A dust storm was coming and the days of racing had ended.
.....Cole Hoffman is a student from the University of Tennessee majoring in Social Work, He loves everything about Eastern Tennessee from rock climbing to camping.
