The blister that had been forming on Madison's hand finally burst, coating the tread of her wheelchair in a thin ooze of blood, making it even harder to push. Her arms had started burning an hour ago, and by now had settled into something more like a constant, screaming ache. She was numb to it. Her thoughts were on the road ahead of her.
14 miles. That was the distance Gramma's almanac had said. She'd triple-checked, with a ruler and everything. 14 miles, give or take a little, from Gramma's house to the Roseville police station, the closest thing to a safe target that she could think to aim for. Sure, she could've gone to some random house, dragged herself onto strangers' stoops and rang doorbells until someone took her in, but what if the people in that house were dangerous? If they were–what was the word Gramma used–hooligans? Criminals? They might try to hurt her.
Or they might turn her back to Gramma. Which would be worse.
No. The police. It had to be the police.
So there she was, wheelchair screeching its way down the shoulder of the highway in the middle of the night, making painfully slow progress. She had no way of knowing how far she'd already made it. Six miles? Hopefully?
The moon hung low in the sky. She had very little time before daybreak, before Gramma woke up, before she became all too visible. Gramma had retired at her usual hour today, and if she kept to her standard weekday schedule she’d be up and watering the plants at 5 AM. Earlier, maybe, if she slept poorly. Which she often did.
She’d made it out of the house without waking her, though, of that she was almost certain. She’d hovered outside the house, by Gramma’s room, ears straining against the background hum of crickets and AC units, breathlessly waiting to hear footsteps or floorboards, anything to indicate she’d made enough noise to wake Gramma up. Opening the combination lock on the closet door (a combination it had taken her nearly half a year of nightly attempts to brute-force), heaving her chair out, unfolding it from her awkward angle on the kitchen floor, she’d done it all as soundlessly as she could have. But it had been impossible not to make some noise, especially when she’d wheeled herself out the back door and around the garden.
She cursed the chair, and everything it represented, even if it was the only thing that was keeping her plan alive, the only reason she was able to make it this far at all. If she hadn't failed six years ago, if she'd just thought the plan through a little more, she could've left on foot, and this all would've been so much simpler. It had taken eighteen straight months of cajoling, of best behavior, to get this, this rickety secondhand piece of equipment, to convince Gramma that she was harmless enough to be trusted with even a little autonomy.
If she caught her now, she knew, she'd never get the chair, or anything like it, ever again. And still, she hated it. She hated the lumbering, tiresome motions it took to propel, she hated its creaking joints and squeaking wheels, she hated the lump in the seat that, even through the growing cloud of numbness enveloping her lower half, she could feel digging into her tailbone.
She hated how it must make her look, now: panting and sweating, hunched, head craning to check over her shoulder every few minutes, to gawk at each rare set of headlights that passed her, terrified they might belong to that silver pickup. It burned her in the tender internal spot Gramma knew to target with her pinpoint backhanded accuracy, the part of her that loathed being perceived as helpless.
And yet, here she was. A couple miles away from home, and Gramma none the wiser. Hopefully. Please, God, hopefully.
The thought of being discovered by her, now, was too much to bear, so she put it out of her mind. Just as she’d put out the pain in her arms and hands, the nagging, childish fear of the dark trees down the gulch off the shoulder, of whatever monsters and hooligans could be watching her flee in the night. She focused instead on an image:
Lions at the Como Zoo. She’d been there once, back when she was really little, before Mama passed and Gramma really stopped letting her leave the house. Before the bed and the hunger and the wheelchair. She’d heard of lions, before seeing them, but had only really thought of them in the absent sort of way she thought about dragons, or robots, or other things that she compartmentalized as being “from TV.”
Seeing them in real life, watching a real, actual 400-pound supercat pace its enclosure, feeling one’s roar in her bones, it was a glimpse into the real size of the world. Somewhere, so much farther than she could picture, these things weren’t confined to zoos. They just lived. Out and about. The feeling was vertiginous, nauseating, but immensely hopeful. She’d thought about the lions a lot lately. They’d become a talisman for her, a reminder of all the things she could see if she just managed to get out of the damn house one day.
And now here she was, bleeding all over Highway 51. Maybe 5 miles away from the house. Still 8,000 or so miles away from Tanzania. It was all so big.
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More headlights. She kept her head down, focused on moving forward. They brightened at her back, followed by the roar of an engine, louder and angrier than the few cars that had passed her so far.
A silver truck shot past her, squealing as it braked, fishtailing across the road. Suddenly the lights were in her face, and the voice she’d dreaded hearing was on the wind:
“Madison?! Oh Lord, Madison, what are you doing out here?”
Heartbeat in her ears, Madison redoubled her efforts, willing her chair to accelerate, as fast as she could. One of her fingernails tore from its bed in her fervor, and she barely felt it.
The truck was heading back to her now, Gramma’s head barely visible poking out of the window, washed out by the headlights. It would be seconds before she was beside her. It was over before it had even begun.
“Madison, girl, hold on! Hold on, I’m coming. Gramma’s coming.”
“No!” she yelled, voice chalky with underuse and exertion. Her hand slipped, too wet with blood, and she shuddered to a stop, chest heaving. “No.”
A wave of apathy seized her. No use fighting now. Another failed escape. She’d survived the last ones. She hung her head and waited, tears falling soundlessly onto her lap, waited for Gramma to come seize the handles of her chair and lug her back into the truck, back to the house, the basement.
She remembered the basement window. Thought of how many years of good behavior it had taken to get even that slight glimpse of sunlight back into her life.
The idea that she might take that away again sprung into her mind, and as Gramma stepped out of the idling truck and approached, her heart lurched back into action.
“Baby, you’re bleeding. What in the world-”
“I won’t let you!” Madison screeched. “I won’t! I won’t!”
Madison wrenched her body sideways and drove her chair, with two great heaves of the wheels, off the road and onto the grass by the shoulder. With another great lurch forward she pitched down the gulch and was speeding down the slope, toward the treeline below. She heard Gramma shriek, barely audible behind the whipping of wind in her ears.
She wasn’t halfway down the hill before the wheelchair caught a rock and flipped, catapulting her out and down. She landed hard, tumbling end over end, shoulder and head and hips hammering into the ground.
When she finally came to a stop at the base of the hill, a few feet deep into the woods, the world was a churning, reddened miasma. She heard more calls from her grandmother, distant and muted by the ringing in her ears, but growing louder, closer already.
The pain had yet to set in, still backseat to panic and despair. Madeline squinted through the curtain of blood seeping from a fresh gash on her brow and pistoned her hands into the ground ahead of her. She crawled forward, one armful of dewy grass after another, at an inchworm’s pace.
“Madison! -----God, what did----- fell! Where---- coming! I’m coming!”
“No.” She sputtered, too quiet for even her to hear. She willed herself forward, away. She shut her eyes against the blood and pushed. Faster. Go faster.
Footsteps were audibly crunching through undergrowth just behind her now, maybe thirty yards back. Too close. Whatever hope she’d had of being hidden by the brush dissolved as those steps grew closer.
“No!” she rasped. “I’m leaving! I’m leaving!”
She moved faster. Somehow, she was going faster. The footsteps hadn’t made it to her yet. Madison didn’t spare any thought as to how this could be possible, her brain held no room for that. Her thoughts, drenched in blood and drowned in the roar of a migraine, centered more on a concept that any words or images: forward. Away. Move. Go.
“Come back! Baby, Madison, come back!”
“I’m leaving! I’m leaving! I’m leaving I’m leaving leave I’ming I am I’m leav-ing!”
Her hands were at her sides now, yet she was still moving. Her head was no longer on the ground. Through the cloudy screen of blood obscuring her one good eye she saw the forest bob ahead of her, bob in the once-familiar rhythm of footfalls.
“Madison! Madison, how are you-” the voice, now, distant and tiny. Tremulous. Shocked?
“I. AM-” Branches whipped her face and arms as she fled. There was a tangible wind, now, whispering in her ears, playing on her skin. The ground was blurring.
Her grandmother screamed something again, too distant to decipher.
The bobbing stopped, but her forward acceleration only grew. The wind howled.
“LEAVING!”
The forest floor dropped away. The canopy stooped down to meet her. Her legs pistoned in the empty air, her hands groped the space ahead. The night sky was before her, now, underneath her.
The sheer speed wicked the blood from her eyes, and for a second, as her panic finally subsided enough to let some confusion in, she was able to focus enough to really absorb what was happening.
The treetops blurred beneath her feet. Lights twinkled ahead, in the city. The wind flowed around her, bearing her up and away. Dozens of stories, up, into the sky.
In the instant that Madison realized she was flying, her momentum disappeared, and she began to plummet back to earth. The ground charged up to meet her, and in her dreamy incomprehension she mustered just enough foresight to brace for impact.