Free Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley Page B

blinking. Whatever had paralyzed his movements left his heart beating and allowed his lids to work on his eyes.
    The thrumming in his bones somehow kept him from being frightened. It was his mother, and the feeling of life so pure and so strong that the thing Ronnie wanted most to do was laugh. And even that, the feeling of a laugh that wouldn’t come out, made the young brawler glad.
    He’d never killed anybody before Lorraine, and somehow God—even if God was a machine and not an old white man in a white beard—had turned the clock back a little bit and given him a chance to undo what had been done. The forest was beautiful and the white girl had taken off all her clothes in front of him and nobody got hurt.
    It was at that moment Ronnie accepted his death. Maybe, he thought, he had died in the police interrogation room or in that Rikers cell when his back was turned and somebody came up on him with a toothbrush turned into a knife. Maybe he had died and come to this imaginary place to have his last thoughts like prayers asking for forgiveness for what he’d done wrong. He had tried in this dream to save the white girl. He had said he was sorry even though people always told him sorry was not enough.
    But sorry was all Ronnie had. He tried in his mind to make things right. He dreamed the girl back to life and imagined the great Silver Box that had God inside. He said he would do what’s right and if that wasn’t enough, if that didn’t make things okay, he’d have to go along with it because there was nothing else to do.
    When Ronnie blinked, he imagined the world coming to an end, but instead a large, emerald green bird flew up and landed on his chest. The long-taloned bird had bloodred eyes. It turned its head from side to side, examining Ronnie.
    Maybe this, the ex-con thought, was his personal executioner studying him for the deathblow.

 
    FIFTEEN
    L ORRAINE RAN DOWN the wide yellow path with long loping strides. She had no way of gauging her speed but she was going somewhere between twenty-five and thirty miles an hour, faster than any human being and with more stamina than almost any creature in the history of creatures. Every now and then she’d bound six or seven feet into the air, landing as lightly as a butterfly on a rose blossom.
    The faster she went, the more she laughed. It was the bug bites, she knew, that had transformed her. Bug bites caused by the Silver Box to give her the speed and agility and the ability to run like this. This was her opportunity to be the woman she had always dreamed of being; with a clear eye and sure feet—the offspring of a goddess tired of men having everything.
    *   *   *
    L ORRAINE RAN AND ran, thinking about her body and not the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx. She was a part of the packed yellow-dirt road and the deep blue sky. There was no such thing as time or necessity, just running faster and faster on a single breath.
    After a while, she had no idea how long, she veered off the path and into the woods, moving deftly between and over braches and roots that rose up out of the ground like tentacles from the sea in some nineteenth-century Jules Verne novel.
    With ease and unaccustomed poise, she climbed the thick-bodied, dark-bark tree in front of her; ran up into the widely spaced branches, among the huge tapered leaves. At the topmost branch, she had to stop but in her heart she wanted to run on the thin air up to the clouds. This desire was so powerful that she cried out and jumped, only to fall back on the upper branch.
    She could hear her steady breathing in the silent canopy of the woods. There her mind slowed down. She realized that her speed had somehow suspended her intellectual predilections. This she took as a blessing. There had never been a moment in her memory where her mind gave up control to her body.
    Her long steady breaths were like the wind through an echo chamber. She saw the world around her as it was: composed of material