If you stare at the end of the empty suburban street for long enough, you might see a long lost vision approach.
It’s a hazy thing, a sweaty chain of dirty-shirted tweens with dust under their nails, on their faces, and in their eyes, the fool’s-gold bronze of their shoulders cracking like snakeskin beneath the crush of the summer sun. Their brace-laced smiles and the ambition-drunk glint of their eyes only glowing brighter as they strut closer, they’re all taking turns kicking a loose stone, playing a game of release and reclamation that only ends when they finally decide to punt their token into the nearest gutter or puddle. As they move, you notice, a Holy Ghost halo of dust hovers around them, a mark of their zealotry to youth.
These are the Dustrunners.
The name was, of course, self-given, a moniker of yelled unison that only heightened their parents’ horror the first time they’d returned home filthy from conquest. None of their mothers or fathers had expected their children to get so gritty when they’d first set them out on the suburban streets, much less scrounge together some sort of identity; and yet, it was a pillar of Dustrunner philosophy to create Everything out of Nothing.
Where were you? Their parents blubbered as they spritzed their children with strain treaters.
Though the Dustrunners’ souls had first been forged in the crucible of their shared cul-de-sac, their true realm laid a half-mile walk South, discovered through a fresh seamline-rip in the trees surrounding their neighborhood and down the wet-black asphalt leading towards the center of what used to be a cornfield. Used to dead-ends, the children hadn’t expected to find anything down this new road; and yet, when the late-afternoon sun cast the veil of itself over the freshly razed plot with the right shade of passion, even the most wizened of travelers were able to see the sudden empire’s grand silhouette: the high spire of its central tower, the surrounding rings of walkable bulwark, the moat diving deep as a dream.
But it was only the Dustrunners who were still able to see the monument’s majesty once the sun did away with the shade.
The construction workers having rent a large rift in the middle of the field so as to lay their foundations, tons of excavated dirt were piled high into the blue to form a ziggurat of debris. A tower of tumbling pebbles and torn roots that resembled the ruin of something once beautiful, the molehill that was an eyesore to the adults of their community seemed to the Dustrunners a mountain, the ground wisdom teeth of some ancient God of Youth: he wanted faith, and they wanted something to lean theirs on. And so, the sweat on the Dustrunners’ backs and the blood on their scraped knees became sacrificial offerings to this dimming deity, hours and then days passing as they set to clamoring up their mound’s cliffs, hollering from its peak, and rejoicing in the rubble of the ever-crumbling kingdom of their youths. Their only law here was liberation, and their only maxim was that naivety was akin to enlightenment.
And yet, their transcendence did not open their eyes to an infallible future: deep down, the Dustrunners knew that this would not last forever. The ouroboros-catch of the American suburbia that they were developing in, of modern life itself, is that it grows by breaking things down. The Dustrunners had seen it happen before their very eyes, they were playing in the bloody mess of its process, and they could even feel themselves beginning to change, a numbness quietly stilling their young hearts’ romantic aches. And yet, it was this very incoming oblivion that bound them to this place, ground their heels into its weary turf, turned every cough of dust into a bittersweet prayer.
Because if everything is going to fall apart, they thought. Why not love it hard until it does?
So they did. Running, tumbling, laughing, tearing up and down the dust which they first came from and to which they knew they would one day return, taking a piece of the end into their hands, the Dustrunners let out every bit of their hearts on the hill until, eventually, it disappeared. A new house identical to all the others took its place. The clan dispersed: some moved away, others stayed put, the rest vanished into the future’s fog.
But they did not mourn. For the kingdom of the Dustrunners, collapsed beneath the fantasy of forever, had already fallen long, long ago.
