The City of Marathons

I've run with them a time or two, sold on getting absolution through sweat.  A way to kill some time here in our city of the dead.  I've run with the still-physical ones that is, real sweat, real rubber pounding pavement, those alive runners so hale and lithe.  A couple marathons a day plotted past my house.  The live ones.

And many more those of the dead, those of the shades.  The immaterial, the passed-over still kicking up a real wind as they run by.  Constant packs of runners generating saline and fetid air in their wakes.  I avoid those packs, I hide - running with the physical ones a way to avoid the dead.  Regardless whether they are manifested by concrete or if the concrete is manifested by them.