He
“Hey. Heyyy. Stop running away from me.” His words smear into each other like glue. “Heyyy!” I hear the rhythmic slap of his trainers on the path. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The wind intermittently traps his syllables as it gusts through Wizard of Oz fig trees. “He…yyy”.
Birdlike, I snap my head around. There are flashes of primary colours: red, yellow. A dash of green and black. A clown outfit? It was October 12 — surely too early for a Halloween party?
Lamp posts shadows track my progress like ominous racetrack markers as I pummel ahead, my breath and gait now straggling. I have only been running for 200 metres but cramps seize my calves.
“Kay….. “Kait…” Could he be calling my name? The once-menacing trees that line my way now beckon. Their gnarled boughs promise sanctuary .
“Kay….tie…” There it is. My name. Yelled in a tone that is…oddly familiar? “Who are you?” I ask in a desperate shriek.
Thwack. Thwack. His footsteps are more distinct. He’s closer, maybe 15 metres behind me. “Katieee…it’s meee…” I allow myself another rapid glance. Underneath the Pennywise makeup I see rheumy green eyes, one iris slightly larger than the other. Ceiling eyes. Alex’s eyes.
“Alex?” Another breathy squeal as I whip my neck back and forth again, pain now firing down my left foot.
He laughs. Not a sinister, Pennywise laugh. An Alex giggle. I slow my sprint to a jog, then a walk. He catches up to me. “Alex,” I pant. “What the fuck?” My legs, fizzing with lactic acid, are shaking. “Katie.” He slings an arm around my shoulder. “Chill out.” His sloppy speech wasn’t just slurred by the wind. I smell traces of sweet bitterness in it. Bourbon.
“How’ve you been, Katiekins?”
“Well, fucking terrified, for a start.”
“Sorry. I left a shitty Halloween party and saw you and didn’t want you to get away without saying hi.”
“You sure didn’t let me,” I grumble, my voice tremulous.
He stumbles over a stray branch and grabs my chest for support, his fingers grazing my breast.
“Woah, steady.”
“Did you like that?” He gives a lopsided smirk, the red paint on his lips bleeding into his cheeks. My breath catches. We are alone. In an inner-city park. At 11pm.
“You used to like that.” A small giggle. “Didn’t you?” He paws at my baggy t-shirt, his large hand grasps my stomach. “Have you put on weight, Katiekins? Doing those 10pm runs to the service station to get cornettos more often? You used to love those.”
He giggles and skips ahead of me, whispering the lyrics to Lizzo’s ‘Tempo’. He stops and pops his slim shoulders up and down in time with the beat of the verse.
Slow songs, they for skinny hoes
Can’t move all of this here to one of those
I’m a thick bitch, I need tempo
“Ok, this has been fun, but I think we need to part ways now,” I say, my shoulders defiant. He stops. Swivels. Grins.
“You’re right, this has been fun. But there’s even more fun to be had,” he says, pantomiming a ringmaster. He lunges towards me. His spider hands are all over me. My screams slash the air as I writhe like a beetle in a web. “Get off me, you piece of shit!” We tussle, left and right, like bantamweight fighters. My elbow jabs into his ribs and, for milliseconds, there is a sliver of air between us.
I turn and run. This time, so fast my eyes water and my lungs freeze. I see nothing but blurry black night. I hear nothing but Converse stomping the path, spraying dirt. He follows.
