“Let me tell you about the women who ran away.” Annie Oakley. Amelia Earhart. Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. Harriet Tubman. Anne Sexton. Cleopatra and Titania. Hell, throw in all the Greek goddesses. And Lilith. And Eve.

And Margaret Atwood. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Virginia Woolf. Arundhati Roy and Tracey Chevalier and Leslie Marmon Silko and Sylvia Plath and Zora Neale Hurston and Sanda Cisneros.

Let me tell about the women who ran away. Who vaulted onto a horse’s bare back and wrapped their skinny legs around the horse’s barreled rib cage and dug their calloused heels into the horse’s sides so that the horse lept and its feet gnawed the ground and flung up chunks of red clay or stones or tufts of grass or sprays of water.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away and stood on the mountain top with their banners waving in a gusting wind. The Joan of Arc who encountered bonfires that couldn’t consume her words even as it swallowed her body. The first queen Elizabeth who refused to give up her seat or Grainne O’Malley who refused to give up the seas to the English.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away. The women who saw the barbed wire wrapped pill packages that denied them their fertility or their infertility or their lives or the lives they wanted to bear or the lives they wanted to bear witness to. The women who were sideswept into the annals of history or the house or the storeroom or the closet or the edges of a locker or the tumultous blankets bleeding across the bed.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away into the night. Into the morning horizon where the sun beats back the night and the stars. Or into the afternoon scorching heat to sow and reap and find and discover and settle into the brown, cracked dusty earth that yields no fruit or bears all fruit or just sifts into jars.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away and escaped into the stars. Cassiopeia doomed to eternal headstands. Andromeda chained to the rock. Ursa Major being hunted by her son while she guides the generations to freer shores.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away and ran forward and ran backwards into their futures or ran sideways to avoid the pitfalls and the chasms and the gaps. Let me tell you about the women who, even now, are running away. Not from what chases them or the threats behind them. But away from the safe houses awaiting them. Away from the sides of the streets or the beckoning home lights or the askew dinner tables.

Let me tell you about the women who ran away from the cookie cutters and the pie rollers and the fork tines and the coffee and tea spoons. Let me tell you about the women who ran toward and forward and with and to and at. Let me tell you about the women’s speed as they dashed and sprinted and vaulted and scrambled and ran and jogged and gamboled and skipped and scampered. Or maybe they walked. Or crawled.

Or

Let me tell you about the women who ran away to face the imperious no.

Let me tell you about the women who ran.