DaVinci Volpe: Running out of Time

He ran across a street weaving in and out of traffic, and over a bridge high above the sparkling that water he could have run across just as easily. It was a beautiful day in the small town of Archer, but he couldn't see the town or the day, it was all just a blur to him, and the town couldn't see him either. He was just a blue streak, a gust of wind, a whipcrack sound in the distance and then he was gone.
The cancer was malignant, inoperable, and terminal. He'd received the news almost a year ago, and he'd been running ever since. But he had felt it these past days in his bones, undermining their structure, in his stomach, gnawing away at his guts. He woke up one morning, nauseaous and frustrated, angry and depressed. He didn't think that he was going to see another tomorrow, and so he did what he had always done, he did what came naturally, he ran. And this time he didn't stop running. He knew what was waiting for him. He knew what was coming when he finally slowed down. He had read it in the headlines of tomorrow's paper, yesterday. The world's fastest man, runs out of time.

The shadows of the monkey bars were long and dark, and all the children had long since gone home. He circled that park like a cyclone. He could see a dark haired child, spinning, laughing giddily on the tire swing. The child was him, forty-seven years ago. At this speed, imagination and memory were clearer than the world around him, and the edges of time blurred.

He ran harder, faster, and the boy began to multiply. He was here, now, on the tire swing, and over there on the monkey bars two days later, and there sitting on the hill looking up at the clouds three days after that. Faster and faster he went. Bones several times denser than those of the average human began to strain under the torque of churning legs; generating a force that would have splintered the thigh bones, shattered the femurs and exploded the knees of an ordinary man.

His vision blurred, the sky screamed, and a multitude of dark haired children burst onto the Scene, each one a little bigger, a little older than the last until they were spread all over the playground like one continuous multi-segmented worm; a rapid succession of little hims, one for every moment of his childhood that he’d spent at that park, until their was a great gap and then the dark haired child returned a twenty-seven year old man, crying on the swings, because his best friend had died, his wife had left him, and he knew that he would never be fully human again.
So he sped up again, tears streaming, and the horizon caught fire, and he could feel the earth turning, feel an unsettling creaking in his joints, his entire body shaking, and vibrating like the cabin of a jet plane flying through a summer storm. But there was no turning back now. He burst out of the park, and streaked to the coast. He needed the ocean, he needed the widest expanse of space he could find. Faster and faster he burst onto the surface of the ocean, faster and faster, and he could see a light. A strange seam in the sky which was brighter than anything he had ever seen before. And his body felt heavy and clumsy, a boat anchor, that was holding him back. His legs were heavy, hinged, machines, outdated contrivances. Faster, and faster, and the crack in the sky grew and grew and other tiny cracks began to appear, and he realized that somewhere along the way he had burned through his costume, and he was tingling, burning through his body as well. He suppressed an almost overwhelming urge to stop running. At this speed, the strain of stopping alone might kill him, and even if it didn't, there was the other thing. So he pushed on beyond his body’s limits, beyond the limits of his body. And the cracks blew open, there was a bolt of lightning and a sonic boom the likes of which the world has never heard, and he burst into flame, or rather into a fiery luminescence. He was warm, and bright, unsheathed from his mortal coil in a place beyond time and space. He was running still, but suddenly gravity’s polarity had been reversed and the effort was required to stay down, rather than up. He was… flying. Gravity had no hold on him, cancer, fear, nothing could hold him anymore. He was a being of pure energy, laughing and streaking all across the globe. He was a being of joy and life running so swiftly that

he was now in a place beyond time. So it was true after all, he thought as his body acclimated to this new sense of weightlessness, this incredible lightness, this unbearably exhilarating freedom. It was true after all, what the paper would say, he had quite literally run out of time.