An Excerpt by Holly Day

From In Summation

This is what your life amounts to—running out the back door and down the service stairs, so sane, finally. Are those sirens? Or are your ears still ringing from the reverb of metal hitting metal, gunpowder igniting, someone screaming next to your head? There has to be some way to make this right, and going to jail is not going to make anything right. You long for wide open spaces free of concrete, skyscrapers, glass, and noise, and so you get in your shiny red car and drive.

You drive. You just get in the car and drive. You take off your shirt while you drive, and your pants, and your shoes, until you are just wearing your pinstriped boxer shorts and a pair of socks, your blood-and-ink-stained clothes random markers on a life disappearing far, far behind you. You grab your sunglasses off the dashboard and slip them on, and now that it’s darker, you feel even more sane. You’re just going to drive until all this is behind you. There are thousands of miles of concrete between here and the ocean, and even more if you drive north/south instead of east/west. That’s the great thing about the Midwest, you think, because you can drive in any direction for a really long time. By the time you hit the ocean, you will have this all figured out.

{Excerpted Piece by Holly Day}