Author Bio

KB BROOKINS

MORNING RUN

 

It’s hard to get back into a routine once it’s been broken, a woman speaking in a voice far too sultry for a wellness app said, so you might as well keep going. That was the alarm I thrice-snoozed till time threatened to set my whole day back. I smudged the crust of sleep out of my eyes then put on sweats with holes in them, a plaid shirt, and the only puffer jacket I owned to run to the live oak tree outside of the Whataburger/Exxon and back.

It’s late February in Malakoff — a time of the year where the climate is usually muggy and threatening to become summer, but this year it had been snowing so hard that the power went out for all the city. And the state. The downed power lines and sheets of hard, off-white ice everywhere were so bad that I’d missed my daily runs for the past week, but I figured that today, I had to run no matter what — even if I fell on the hard ice and dislocated my back. Even if I couldn't find a path around the debris. Even if I got stranded, or if I saw a dead body floating in Cedar Creek. All of these scenarios would be better than sitting in that miserable house where my parents looked at me like I was the cause of every natural disaster year-round. My runs were  partly because I was on the wellness kick that everyone goes on during their quarterly life crisis, and partly because I needed to get away from my parents for an hour.

When I walked outside, I learned quickly that I was overdressed. Fuck, I said in a morning mucus-filled voice. I cleared my throat then hacked up some yellow sludge onto the concrete.

A year before the storm, I’d been living my best life in Austin, not so far that I couldn’t come home if needed, but far enough away that I could be a lesbian comfortably. All my high school friends went to Trinity Valley, and I could’ve gone there too. I insisted on Austin. I was offered a full ride to UT Tyler — housing, tuition, and fees ’cause I ran a mean 100-meter yard dash; I insisted on Austin. UT Austin (or as my daddy calls it, The Cow School) didn’t give me anything but a burnt orange you got in packet and an explanation of costs in the mail. When I got there and realized I didn’t know what I could do successfully besides run, I majored (and flunked out of) nursing, then changed my major to Poetry, mostly for the aesthetic of being deep and mysterious, then when I realized I wasn’t good at that either (a teacher wrote you don’t have to do this on one of my sonnets), I dropped out completely. Still, I insisted on Austin. My parents were poor and I thought I knew everything and I had a nerve-deep belief that a big city could save me from being biblically damned to a lesser life — one where I had to be a closeted farmer on an acre of land my family’s owned for hundreds of years in a city where everybody knew each other but not a soul outside of Malakoff knew it even existed.

Why can’t you just get married to a nice boy and take over the farm, my dad would ask, sweat shiny on the back of his neck. Why you gotta go off to the Cow School?

Don't you want to start a family and raise them here, my mom would ask. Don’t you know how dangerous them big cities are?

I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t want their same sweat and grass stains, their long days fighting off gnats and white business owners. I didn’t want to wear a muumuu and cook fish I caught in my backyard for big-headed kids and a man who thought that being gay was worse than being dead. I couldn’t tell them that I thought less of them, so I told them I insisted on Austin because I needed to find answers to their questions. And is it so bad to want something better?

After taking a few layers off, I headed out toward the Whataburger/Exxon.

For the first mile, all I saw was destruction. Cars abandoned on the side of the road, power lines and street signs dented in by the wind. Mr. Johnny’s entire wire fence had fallen down. That was probably the first fence I ever climbed, back when Samantha and I would spend every weekday wondering who could hop her fence the fastest and who had the wettest kiss. We’d smooch and hop the fence and smooch some more until Mr. Johnny caught us then sent Samantha off to boarding school.

I looked down at the fence as Mr. Johnny walked up to his screen door.

“Hey, Mr. Johnny,” I yelled out.

“Mmm,” he said back. He never said more than that to me, either because he ain't got no teeth or because he’s still pissed about the whole being dykes with his daughter thing.

“Have a good one,” I said, then kept on jogging.

I moved to Austin for undergrad twelve years ago and made a name for myself — DJ Plant Daddy among them. After realizing I was not the next Katherine Johnson nor Audre Lorde, I ended up a part-time DJ at Cheer Up Charlie’s. My whole gimmick was having a bunch of house plants on the stage with me during my sets, which distracted from the worst song transitions you’ve ever heard. For two meager years, I got paid in drink tickets and timid smiles. I asked for a full-time gig at Rain and the owner nicely patted me on the shoulder and said stay in school. I wish I’d taken his advice. At a hitching post, a little further down from Mr. Johnny’s, I refilled my water bottle littered with DJ Plant Daddy stickers.

A mile ahead and there was basically no snow. Hell, this part of Malakoff looked like it’d been untouched by the storm completely. This catastrophe that confined me to cold rooms shared with my parents and their disappointment seemed, based on these streets, make-believe. How could that be? How could this storm that felled Mr. Johnny’s fence not be splattered all over everything? It was like the yellow-brown grass, covered just yesterday like a frosted sheet cake, was asking me to move on. But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t move on from my ex-girlfriend stealing my DJ gear and moving to LA with some stud that was, unfortunately, hotter than me. I couldn’t outrun burning through my student loan money and getting evicted. I couldn’t outpace running out of couches to surf after a decade of fucking every lesbian in Central Texas, pushing me to move back into the shotgun house that sat on an acre of land that I was so desperate to leave. The sky broke open and decided to stop oppressing Texas, but what about life oppressing me? I couldn’t move on from any of it.

Sweat sheened my face as I started sprinting. My clothes were drenched, and I could feel my heartbeat in my neck. Still, my body told me to run. Despite the ice, the debris in the street, I jumped and weaved, fueled by nothing but anger about everything in my life that made “wellness” impossible. You can’t wellness your way out of being royally screwed by god. I am a Black, butch girl from a city and a state that felt like a trap.

I’d call that surge of energy a runner’s high but I’d felt that before. This wasn’t like that. I was barreling towards something I couldn’t name.

Four miles down and I was finally at the Whataburger/Exxon. I panted, trying to spot both the 20-foot, bright green live oak tree usually right in front of the big orange W sign and the water bottle I’d dropped somewhere along the way. My buckling knees and short, ragged breaths reminded me that my days of being a track star were in the past. I collapsed onto a patch of loose dirt.

A copper-colored teen sporting an orange Whataburger shirt came running. Ma’am, ma’am are you okay? they said, cupping my head with their sticky, likely unsanitary hands. They had the southern drawl of someone four times their age.

Where’s, the, tree, I managed in between short breaths. My eyesight had gone fuzzy.

Get me some water! the teen yelled at someone inside. Huh? they said to me.

The tree, I said, pointing to the ground. The tall, beautiful live oak tree was usually right where I was laying.

The teen said, flatly, Oh, it fell in the storm. Somebody from the city chopped it up and hauled it off this morning.

I started to cry. Maybe I was mourning the tree that I’d been running to since before my wellness kick, before I even smooched Samantha after school. That tree that I moved two hundred miles away from was where I’d practiced my 100-meter dashes. It’s in the background of so many birthdays and track-meet afterparties and my prom. My god, why was I crying so hard I couldn’t breathe? It never occurred to me till this moment, lying on the aftermath of this loss, that I even cared about anything in this city, much less a tree beside a fast-food joint/gas station.

Oh no, the teen said, then dropped my head to the ground. They ran to get those one-ply napkins they have at the Whataburger condiment stations. Why are you crying? What hurts? They wiped my face and little pieces tore with every wipe.

I’m a 30-year-old lesbian with $30,000 of debt and a couch at my parents’ place in Malakoff. I can’t even afford a Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit if I don’t ask my daddy for money before I leave. I had a full ride to run track and now I can’t even run a 5k without falling apart. Everything hurt.

Nobody even said the word lesbian in Malakoff. My daddy said bulldagger and my mama said on the pink side. The fact of who I am was forbidden to say, and on top of that, I was acting incredibly weird. Oh no, she’s hallucinating, the teen yelled, then sprayed an ice cold 32-ounce cup of water on my face. Call an ambulance! they said to someone back in the Whataburger.

My eyes started recalibrating, and I took in the teen for the first time. They were tall, stubby, and gender ambiguous, kind of like me at their age. I cracked a little smile.

Where you from?

Here, they said, looking at me like I was unwell. My folks live round the way. The teen sounded like my parents, my cousins — like home.

I gestured to them to help pick me up and they did. I told them I was starting to feel better and to call off the ambulance; they take thirty-ish to drive from UT Tyler anyway. What are you doing after you graduate? I said, picking all the napkin debris off of my face.

No offense, but you’re creeping me out.

Don’t go to UT, I said, then thanked them for their assistance.

I started running back home with a 32-ounce cup of water that sloshed all over the ground. The sun has fully come out of its shell and the mallards are making mating calls in the Cedar Creek. There are no dead bodies or dead dreams in the lake, only birds calling, searching for a new answer.