Runaway: Stories

Robin Greig, a nurse in her mid-twenties, lives with her asthmatic older sister, Joanne, in a small Ontario town. On a summer evening, she frets about whether her green dress will be ready for her upcoming trip to Stratford. She claims that she’ll “die if they don’t have that dress ready” (236), provoking Joanne’s quiet scorn. For five years, Robin’s solitary excursions to Stratford to attend a Shakespeare play have given her “an assurance that [her] life […], which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, [is] only temporary” (239). She savors the performances, her solitary walks by the river, and the train ride home. These experiences turn her otherwise confined life into something interesting and unique.

The previous summer, she had seen Antony and Cleopatra. After the play, she discovered that she had lost her purse in the theater’s restroom. With no money or train ticket, she wandered in distress until a large Doberman brushed against her. Its owner, a man with a foreign accent, reassured her. She told him about her lost purse, and he offered to lend her money. Then, he invited her to his home for food before she took her train.