The pretender²⁴

At four o’clock this morning I ran four and a half miles. As usual, my pace was 8:40. Two girls were helping the road crew and holding markers at every quarter-mile. Each time they held up the sign, I was pretending that the numbers indicated a full mile, not just a quarter-mile. They put up the number one marker, and I pretended I had run one mile. But when it was sixteen, I had only run four miles — not sixteen. Then I had to stop pretending.