Goose Chase

“Christ, we don’t have time for this, May,” I growled, pulling my younger sister through the fields with me. Her floral sundress dress was getting caught between her legs, and it made me think that maybe, just maybe, attempting to escape through an orchard wasn’t the best idea at hand, but the clumps of trees gave us an opportunity nonetheless. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a shot hiding behind some of the trees.

“Mark, we can’t keep running like this,” she spit out fast, panting as her short strides fought to keep up with my longer ones. Her curly, fiery red hair began flying in her face as my eyes ran wild, fighting for another space to fit ourselves into. The police would catch up at any moment if I didn’t act fast enough to guide her to safety, and lord knows what would happen if I couldn’t keep that promise up. I had to, if not for the both of us, then at least for her. The voices of the police may have been a bit behind us, but they definitely weren’t far enough away to leave us out of the situation.

Being a gambler wasn’t exactly the best thing to latch onto as a 22-year-old, but after losing our parents, it was the only thing I could do to stay afloat with May. It worked well, it paid bills, and it kept us together for as long as we needed to until I could find something better. She was only a child, after all, finishing her junior year of high school. This time, however, wasn’t even our fault. At least my gambling wasn’t stealing. These policemen were looking for an actual thief, and clearly our voices weren’t worth hearing when they already decided we were culprits.

“Turn yourselves in, or we will be forced to use arms!” one shouted. A visceral flinch made my vision a bit short for a split second before I yanked her behind one of the trees. Right behind it was a lower patch of dirt that sank just a little bit in front of a small bush. Everything in me hoped that one tiny section could hide us just until they gave up enough to go somewhere else. As we crouched down, May looked at me with fearful eyes.

“Mark, what the hell is going on?” she demanded.

“May, you need to keep your voice down or they’re going to hear us,” I whispered back. “They may be looking for us, but they’re looking for the wrong person nonetheless.”

“So who are they even looking for?”

I put my hand over her mouth hastily while the sound of boots crunching came closer and closer. They were only a breath away from noticing where we were hiding, and I could feel the tension nearly balding me in that moment alone. It felt like I would need to become an insect and dig myself far enough into the ground to be safe at that point. May’s small hands scrunching up the sleeves of my light blue dress shirt made it feel as if my heart was gaining different needles that stabbed into it every aching second. It made me feel ashamed every time. Each time I wondered more and more if my choice caused more hurt than safety, even if it was a panic choice.

Soon, the sound of their feet lessened and lessened until we couldn’t hear them anymore. I raised one of my hands to my mouth and gave a quick zip signal to let May know she shouldn’t start speaking again. I rose to a crouch with her in my arms, guiding her to do the same, and began creeping away in the direction they came from. As we continued on in secret, navigating as if we had eyes on the back of our heads, I started up again. “Do you remember that guy we saw on the news a while ago? Some guy named Jake Evans, I think?”

She slowly blinked at me. “Yeah…? What about him?”

“Remember when we made that joke that he looks a lot like me?”

“Yeah, and then we—oh.”

“Exactly.” I finally stood completely, holding both her hands again to pull her up and shifting one of them to her back. Crouching for that long was vastly uncomfortable as it is, so I fought to make sure she wouldn’t be feeling what I’m already used to. I took a sigh and straightened out my dress pants. “All this dressing up today for a prize to win, just to get chased around instead. What a wild card, huh?”

She huffed. I presume she didn’t find the joke as funny as I had hoped. We continued to crunch along in silence after, simply trying to find our way back out of the orchard. The thought of changing my career occurred to me all over again, as it did every time I came home to see May’s face glancing up at me from the living room table, her eyes questioning my whereabouts. Of course she knew what I did, but she never knew if I wouldn’t return the same way our parents didn’t. I shook my head.

After a while, the trees and grass began to clear up to the path we barely remembered running down; it was just a clear, flat dirt path, but it led directly to where we needed to get home. My eyes blurred a bit before I could realize it, and I had to turn my head away from her. They were tears, another thing I’ve never let May see on me. I refused to face her, but I was sure she would hear it the moment she heard me speak.

“May, I’m so sorry about all of this,” I muttered. “Maybe if I didn’t look so suspicious… Maybe if I wasn’t such a suspicious person to begin with, I wouldn’t be pulling you through something like this.”

May raised an eyebrow at me, almost as if she was confused instead of being upset with me. “What do you mean? How is it your fault that the stupid police decided not to pay attention?”

“They wouldn’t have to attempt paying attention if I could stay away from such shady places,” I explained. I ran a hand through my hair and took a deep breath. “There is one thing I know one hundred percent, and it’s that I’m going to get us out of this. I have to, no matter what.” She patted my shoulder.

“We can figure that out later, but the first thing we need to get out of is this gross farmland area. My dress is already messed up.”

I chuckled again. There she was again, my little sister May, the sassy girl who always had the right words to cheer me up, no matter what. Sometimes it came to me that I wasn’t just doing this for her. Sometimes, all it took was to recognize that having her around was a justice to my own peace of mind as well. I nodded and let my smile spread slowly across my face. In a world full of haste and barrel scraping, I could always come back and let my world slow down with her.

“Alright, alright, let’s get to stepping then,” I laughed, tugging her arm a little to joke back with her. It felt like locating an oasis to see her smile again after this whole goose chase. I could see her dimples forming again under her freckles, and it reminded me of when we were kids all over again, how I used to poke them for fun as she tried swatting me away. Nothing but enjoyment to find in a household like ours, no matter how hard things became for either of us.

“Mark? Remember that one office I told you was hiring or something?”

“Yeah; what about it?”

“Get a pen and paper, find their number, and start there. If you don’t, I’m stealing all your things until you do.”