‘When To Run’

Jewon Oh, an 8th grader at Seoul Foreign School, ignites his passion for aeronautical and aerospace engineering alongside architectural engineering, STEM, and mathematics. With a visionary spark, he dreams up blueprints for skyward structures and star-bound crafts, fusing equations with epic designs.

When To Run

Wild horses made Rabbit cry. 

She used to watch a movie with her father, the same one every time, about a wild horse in the vast open land. Now, she thought about them with the kind of longing one feels for a life they could have had, had they chosen it. Wild horses. True freedom, true freedom in a country that didn’t truly have freedom anymore. At least, not for Rabbit. 

The alarm jerked her from a dream, one where she felt the wind whip through her hair, felt the long grass beneath her feet. Instead of the plains, she sat up on a lumpy full mattress, one just slightly too small for her to share with her fiancé. Fiancé. That was new. New to Rabbit, new to life, a newborn. She would be a bride. Her husband snored beside her, as she thought about this. He would snore beside her for the rest of her life. She smiled. 

 The train rattled and squeaked, heaving forward, panting as though it flew down the rails, much faster than ten miles an hour. She wished it would slow further, or speed up, of which she couldn’t be certain. The train took her into the heart of Coketown, the smog-clouded, piss-filled, sky-scraping city. She’d been lucky to catch one of the solitary seats by the train doors, where she wouldn’t have to worry about her arm brushing up against another, where she could cross her legs without tucking in her feet. The doors chimed open, and an old man in various shades of camouflage stepped partially on. He glanced around, mouth agape, and the doors chimed closed, their momentum halted by his liver-spotted body. 

“Do you need help?” Rabbit asked. 

The man gestured with his head towards the closest four seats, his mouth puckered as he spat out his words. “I need one of you four to figure out who is going to give me their seat.” 

Rabbit stood. “You can sit here.” 

She walked up the stairs and sat beside another woman, the sound of the man complaining about how the youth lacked respect, how he deserved respect, how he was entitled to respect, following her all the while. 

“Fucking asshole,” she muttered. 

The train ground to a halt and Rabbit left, pushing through the organic curtain of bodies and out onto the wobbly paved street. A transit cop, a big fucker, must have been six-eight, stood on the escalator in front of her. The urge to grab his gun filled her mind, though she kept her hands at her side.
Aboveground, the street teemed with tobaccobuzzed yellowteethed busybodies, everyone hurrying to get to where they were going. Rabbit walked slower than the average, she didn’t like to hurry. Life was about the journey, as everyone said constantly. But if the journey was terrible, the least she could do was not arrive sweating to work. 

“Good morning, Rabbit,” Martha called from behind her desk. 

“Good morning,” Rabbit called back. She thumped her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk and resigned herself to another day.
Around noon, Rabbit got a call. 

“I’m pregnant,” June said, her voice saccharine as it slipped through the telephone wires, all the way from Upstate. 

“Again?” Rabbit asked. June’s daughter hadn’t turned one yet, she barely slept through the night. 

“Yes, again,” June laughed. “We didn’t mean for it to be so soon, but I’m pregnant. Due on your birthday, actually.”

Rabbit laughed. “You’re kidding. Well, at least I’ll have someone to go fifty-fifty with on the cake.”

A baby squalled in the background, and June hung up. Another baby. Two in two. Rabbit could only imagine. She had been asked, moreso ever since saying YES, about her plans to become a mother. Her answer was not one easily digested by most, especially when saying one YES usually meant saying a second YES in quick succession. 

“No,” Rabbit said. 

No. She would not be having children. 

No. That would not be an issue for her in the future. 

No. She would not change her mind. 

No. 

Her fiancé wanted kids. But men want kids the way kids want dogs. As little playmates, to foist off onto the true owner when times got shitty. Her fiancé would live without a baby. She would get him a dog. 

Rabbit spent the rest of the day thinking about June, about her daughter, about her unborn sapling. June had given up herself, in order to be everything for her child. She would do this over and over, until she ran out of kids. The Abdication of the Self, Rabbit thought, in between writing emails. Motherhood is an Abdication of the Self. 

In Motherhood, it is expected, it is instinctual, to betray Nature and put another being before oneself. Mothers sacrifice their sleep and their peace and their Minds to keep their babies fed and happy. Mothers throw themselves in front of bullets, in front of cars, in front of angry husbands to keep their babies safe. Motherhood is an inversion of the Natural Order, it is the Natural Order flipped on its head. Motherhood is altruism borne of selfishness. 

Rabbit asked her fiancé over spoonfuls of rice and chicken, the same dinner they’d had four times that week. 

“Do you think that Motherhood goes against the grain of organic life?”

He swallowed, blinked. The light from the lamp bounced off his head, hair shorn close to the scalp. He was so handsome, Rabbit could hardly believe it sometimes. 

“I think Motherhood IS the grain of organic life.”

Rabbit frowned. What was more natural than being a mother?

“But Nature demands concern for the self, for the perpetuation of the self, above all things. So Motherhood is a conflict. It conflicts with the hardwiring of all animals.”

“How can it conflict when propagation of the species is truly the driver of life?” He replied.

Rabbit took another bite of chicken. The flesh was tender beneath her teeth. He hadn’t overcooked it tonight. He was making progress. 

If it was, indeed, Natural for females to betray themselves, in favor of their young, then the difference had to lay within Humanity. 

Women gave up themselves, they sacrificed themselves on the altar of Motherhood and brought forth their children, and in doing so, could never be anything before they were Mothers. 

Motherhood came First. 

Rabbit lay back in that bed, her arm brushing against his, and listened to the soft inhale and exhale of the man she would love for the rest of her life.
The train was full as she boarded the following morning. A conference of some sort, she figured, by the sea of gray suits flooding her visual plane. 

She thought of Dialectics, of the way he had tried over and over to explain them to her. Dialectics, more specifically, Dialectical Materialism, was a way to See the world and understand the cause and effect of Nature. It was a study of conflicts and consequences. 

Then, as she walked along the potholed street into the building with fluorescent lights and nondescript inoffensive whatever decor, she thought of herself as both Human and Woman. 

Was it not a Dialectic, to be both at the same time? 

Was it not an inherent conflict, built into her by Nature? 

She was a Human, and she longed to be Free. She longed to escape this life, the one she had built, and find where she could go and never have to feel the pressure of rent-food-utilities-heat-work-work-work. To be beholden to only herself. 

But she was also a Woman, and somewhere inside her body, hidden deep in the buzzing bopping folds and coils of her cells, was the urge, the desire, the need to abandon her Humanity in favor of Motherhood. The wish to create something that would love her unconditionally, that would share her face and her voice and her laugh, that would keep her alive long after she had died. 

All she needed to do, to get That, was to give up Herself. 

In the end, each woman needed to choose, one or the other. In every situation, either the Human would destroy the Woman, or the Woman would destroy the Human. Unlike some Dialectics, in which the two opposing forces could eventually merge and meld and settle into one, the Feminine Dialectic could not resolve itself without the destruction of the One by the Other. At  her desk, ignoring her tasks, ignoring the mundane urgency of life in an office, she thought.

Suddenly, a rush of blood. Like the levees breaking, she felt it to her core.
She hadn’t had her period in seven weeks.
Heat. 

Her anger was hot, a heat that was only tempered by the cool wind of relief. 

In the apartment, with her great love, she sat and ate chicken cold out of its plastic container. 

“I got my period today,” she said. 

“Oh,” he replied. His face fell, and she felt the shame of an adult disappointing a small child. She knew he had been hopeful that this one would stick. She had been hopeful that it wouldn’t. 

Anger resurfaced. That she couldn’t give this man what he wanted, that she couldn’t pick between the two. That her body rebelled against her mind.
In her mind, where things made a sick, sickening sort of sense, she knew that the world was not good. She knew that her child would be forced to work until they died. She knew that there was the strong possibility that her child would have to fight other children for clean, potable water. She knew that she oftentimes wished she hadn’t been born at all, and she knew that she could not, would not subject her child to the same fate. 

Having a child was a decision based purely on selfishness. A child could not consent to be born. The child’s Mother made that decision, the choice to bring them into the world through blood-sweat-pain-rage-joy. 

In her body, she longed to lengthen herself, to stretch herself through the generations. In her body, she longed to love a child above all things. Because it wouldn’t just be A child. It would be Her child. And she would love It more than she loved Herself. 

“Goodnight,” she said, laying flat on her back, the knowledge of her blood sticky and suffocating as it carried her child out and away. 

“Goodnight,” he said, his back turned away from her. 

Pain boiled into anger, solidifying, crystallizing.
The train shrieked, metal on metal. Rabbit had not gotten a good seat, those had all been taken. She sat between two men, her legs pinned together, her shoulders hunched, her mind sharp and venomous. 

“Good morning, Rabbit,” Martha said. 

“Good morning,” she replied. 

“The Roberts want to meet with you today, I sent you an invitation for a meeting at eleven.”

Sweat pricked from her skin, cold with terror. She sat, frozen, only moved by the sudden bolts of pain in her uterus. Nothing meant much of anything. Nothing had for a while. When she graduated college, a bright-eyed-bushy-tailed-optimist, she’d learned that the Real World cared nothing for her, for her mind, for her heart. She gave up on her dreams, she was a pragmatist, and made double what she would have as a Postdoc doing Office Work and feeling like an orca in a swimming pool.

“Rabbit, thank you for taking the time to sit with us,” Robert S. said, sitting on the side of the conference table where she sat. 

Bees swarmed in her head, stinging, constant in their fury. 

“Rabbit, we know how hard you’ve been working lately,” Robert W. said, sitting on the opposite side of the table. 

She imagined them two devils, red and blue, melting together into the color of the purple bruise she felt growing on her spirit. 

“We appreciate all that work, we truly do, and Inverta thanks you for everything you’ve done,” Robert W. continued. 

“However,” Robert S. said, smiling an oilslick smile. “As this company moves and expands, we have found that we aren’t seeing a natural place for you within our expansion.”

No Natural Place. 

“So we have come to the sad, and quite deeply unfortunate conclusion that we cannot continue to offer you employment here at Inverta. You’ll have severance through the summer, and are welcome to file for unemployment once that time comes to a close.”

A close. 

The train doors slammed closed, shutting out the gray air and the gray light of the gray city. Rabbit sat, feeling like an island far out to sea, untouchable. She was untouchable. She had to be.

“I got fired,” she said, chicken flavorless as chum in her mouth. 

His brow furrowed. “Okay.”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

The words threw themselves from her lips, true as poison. She couldn’t bring herself to find another job, she couldn’t bring herself to wheedle for something so far beneath her. She couldn’t bring herself to stay in the city, in the gray. She couldn’t bring herself to keep going, now that momentum had caught up with her. A flare of whitehot pain lanced down her body. She couldn’t do it. 

He sighed. “What will you do?”

Rabbit stared at him for a long time, memorizing those eyelashes, the close cropped hair, the wide, trusting eyes, the petal-soft smile.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she said. Her face flooded, magma and saltwater, as she came undone. 

“Then you need to go,” he said, his mouth upturned, bittersweet, his eyes flecked with the same tears. He took her hand. She wanted desperately to fuse their skin together, so that she couldn’t do what she knew she must. But a rabbit knows when to run. “You need to go.”

Rabbit packed that night. She packed everything she could, though everything meant almost nothing when she couldn’t fit him inside her suitcase. As he loaded her last trunk into the car, she stared at him, willing him to help her change her mind. 

All he said was, “Come back when you remember who you are.”

She nodded. Who she was. Human and Woman and everything inbetween. She could do that. She could remember. And then she could come home. 

Elysse Ladjevic is a retired neuroscientist and writer of magical realism, literary, and Gothic stories. Marooned in Boston, she often writes about her Californian upbringing as a way to go back home.