How My Cousin Who Ran Away in the 80s

Spent Her Last Hours
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By Wendy BooydeGraaff

1. She backflipped down the Don Valley Parkway—flip, flip, flip—because she loved gymnastics and she was tired of doing perfect cartwheels. Flip, flip, flip, until flip, over the guardrail and into oblivion.
2. She swallowed too many raw eggs, like Rocky, but she didn’t have a boxing match to expend the energy so she succumbed to salmonella, silently, in the streets, far from a hospital’s prying eye.
3. She danced at the Molson, hard and fast. Blurred with sweat, she spun into the grass and then Lake Ontario gobbled her up, but only because she allowed herself to be gobbled by the cold, gray waves.
4. She trusted someone who hurt her, so she hurt him back, worse than she expected, and had to run and run and run until her heart escaped her chest.
5. She found a way out of who she was and into who she became, so her last hours were only the last hours of who she was and if I were to see her today, she would be a different person who had new memories that overwrote the old ones, only there’d be a hidden file and seeing me, she’d click on it, and re-watch the time she tried to teach me to cartwheel on our rectangle lawn and how she stayed patient and persistent while again and again, I fell, and a magical icon would enable her to see how vibrant and full she was—too vibrant and full for the monochrome story she had been living in her small spaces—and she’d see how I understood why she had to run away to the wide open city. Even if I didn’t know the details, I sensed why, and I would’ve done it, too, if I were in her place. 

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Wendy BooydeGraaff's fiction, poems, and essays have been included in CutBank Online, Lily Poetry Review, NOON, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States. Find out more at wendybooydegraaff.com.