Since I’m basically an old white man, full of everyone else’s opinion and generalities, I’m glad you asked me. Is this for school? Of course it is. But know: the world, and pat assignments, will be there tomorrow. So instead follow this tangent: how jogging is good for you. Look up the definition of endorphins. Now don’t bother with statistics or citation. Just go. Running out an evening, an empty footing always just east of west, you must jog farther! Past the cedar mill, past Hilltop, even past Old Highway 8, and keep going. No, you don’t need a map, a destination time. Disconnect to connect. Feel the give of inadequate earth, unirrigated, a garden yet unimagined. But this isn’t an original accomplishing: to choose from what once was the limitless ground—to unearth time outside of now, just beyond the border of civilization. This is a story you’ve heard before. Does that make it plagiarism? You ask me. I answer: run further, until the barren land no longer echoes. The day’s devil drains out your heels. Dusk spreads out an unnamed ocean that circumvents a death shape, something like a chalk outline, one that catches around your toes and in your growing moon-shadow. This is no garden after all. No harvest, no paradise, no prison. Still, you run—faster, straighter—run to feel alive. Healthy. Righteous even. Trance and trample, as you must. Ignore the side-stitch digging at your rib. Ignore your pregnant parts. The way your belly interchanges with each heartbeat, eclipsing a faster heartbeat within. Think: not baby, still you. You, watering sweat carelessly as others drop sloughed skin to dust under the bed, you. Yes, you are something here. Really something. Maybe you should stay. For dinner—it’s snake. A high desert oddity you have never before tried. I will find you a recipe. Fit partial moons loosed from her spine into sausage, add an apple.