Peg Leg Meg

Peg Leg Meg

	Megan Thomas had a lot of interests, she didn’t understand why people thought she was always about running.

	Meg had daddy issues, and her mom was a hothead, and she was teased during her early life by the other kids; it’s no wonder how she ended up headstrong. She isn’t afraid to speak out against something she disagrees with, even if it isn’t the best idea to do so. She likes spicy food and horror movies, especially the bloody ones. She had plans to go skydiving – the ultimate thrill. She was a hectic kind of person, someone you might be a little jumpy around since you don’t know what they’ll do next. Sometimes you just have to be wild like that to get through life, but not too many people get that like Meg does. Keeps you moving forward.

	She’s self-aware enough to know that moving forward doesn’t mean happiness. It’s a way to keep having a goal, to keep your hands – or legs – from being idle. It’s more of a worldview rather than a sustainable lifestyle. She has other things that please her – she has tried making her own home movies, even if the angles are lacking and the lighting harsh. She’s done some woodworking more than once, and, as embarrassing as it is to admit, she knows more than a few things about applying makeup. Running was another one of those things, a more public thing she did to release all that energy.

	She hated, hated, hated being stopped. That running was essential, allowing her to channel herself into other things. It was how she expelled the negatives in her mind, clearing her psyche for other things in her life, like school, hobbies, or her mom. If there was ever a day when she didn’t get to go for her jog through the woods, she would be an unstable bomb of pent up energy. She had to keep moving to live her life normally.

	It is for precisely this reason she hates the thing chasing her. She can run, run at her best, run as fast as a human can run, but she always gets trapped. There is no worse feeling than the rusty teeth snagging her ankle as she’s right at the doors to salvation. She’s helpless, shaking hands slipping off what's eating her leg as the monster grins at the sound of the snap.  If she just ran smarter, not harder, or if the damned thing chasing her wasn’t so clever, or maybe if someone was there to help her through this. She needed to run, she had to or she’d die and she’d never see her movies or track team or friends or mom –

	Her death, physically, was only temporary. But it held lasting effects on her mind and the mind of the soul who watched it happen and did not help.