Jess Martini

Track and Field

non-fiction

I pass the night time running around the track at my old high school now that the world has quarantined itself from me. Shivering in a moonless December realm, I’m stunned at the stars in this dark little town as I sweat in circles, familiar, with echoes of a shot rang out for sprints and contests, whispering, now a less urgent siren. I was not fast enough to earn the prize, and I remember the fire in my ribs, how breathing was desperate, and now I call it ​discipline.

The devotional mornings in high school, I prayed to a known god for what was prophesied to happen already anyway. Supposedly a tension existed between the will of god and man. The great good kingdom would come, or it wouldn’t, but in the uncertainty, I devoted myself to pleading. Now, since the world has shied away from my pleading invitations for a new kind of kingdom where I might belong, even be prized, I take up prayer again, hardly your disciple. 

I don’t know you, but I know
you know me... 

Already this is intimate, more so than I care to admit. As I stare into however many eyes you blink twinkling, arched in the highest space I see, and above that, the higher space I can’t see, I feel grateful that I’m stupid, running around this sphere. Which lane loses, anyway, and should I sprint to come in last? 

Your laughter is so brief and witchy: me thinking I’ve transcended ordinary people and their rusty religions. 

It’s dark enough to see only the corners and edges of hurdles and goal posts and bleachers lit up by the highway traffic nearby. It’s a dim ambiance, your appreciation, maybe: I’m searching for you again. You say, don’t you know ordinary people are my delight? 

Jess Martini graduated from the Northern Arizona University MFA program in 2015 and has since taught writing, edited and written political articles, and worked with students in ed-tech. Her creative writing has appeared in CutBank, The Hunger, Wayfarer, and others. Get to know her at www.sincerelyjessmartini.com.