It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried to keep up. Her outside mouth had bantered with them about the uses of rape in film, about job prospects, about the NASDAQ. She’d let them take her out to dinner, take her to bed. She’d thought that would save her. They didn’t see the hands rising from the earth to pull at her ankles and shins, drawing her backwards. The fingers were sticky and cold, reached down inside her throat, pulled out her heart and breath, threw them down to the bottom of the hill. She turned back. At the bottom of the hill, she had just dusted off the quieting beat of her heart, readying to swallow it whole, when she saw the man with the knife. She turned to run back up the hill, but her legs wouldn’t work, and the meat of her heart was stuck in her throat, so she could not scream.
The gravity around her thickened. It brought her to her knees, dropped her onto all fours, then onto her belly like a slug. Friends and classmates tossed conversation over her head like a football. She waited for them to notice, shame rinsing all of her limbs. She dug her fingers into the soil, grabbed hold knots of oxalis, pulled hard, slowly inched forward. The man with the knife gained on her, and the screams that pushed up from her belly caught beneath her heart. Around her, friends and classmates studied for exams, had love affairs, graduated, travelled to Europe on Fullbrights, joined bands, wrote books, made movies. They got married, had babies, raised families, stopped drinking, got clean, got divorced or stayed married, made love, had affairs, made money, built lives. She was still trying to get away from the man with the knife. Her muscles ached; adrenaline made her body a thing of tremor and ice. Behind her, the man with the knife got closer. Gravity had no hold on him. Ahead, her friends disappeared. They crested the hill, went to grad school, joined firms, took jobs, joined the army, started 401Ks and college savings accounts, bought cars and houses and dogs. Even if she’d had a voice in her throat, there wasn’t anyone to hear her except the man with the knife, who was always almost upon her and knew all of her secrets already anyway. She tore the skin on her fingers, dragging her body up the hill, waiting for a plunge of pain between her shoulder blades.
Perhaps she climbed for an hour. Perhaps one hundred years.