You Were Gone When We Found You

I

It’s the old road that draws Kendra down. She’s always liked those twisting back pathways in the forest, the way they hint at things that very slightly (and only very slightly) were not. Her car rumbles over the trodden path and for a moment she questions the wisdom in coming. She had no idea what lay beyond this twisting old road, unpaved and studded with those iron gray rocks that jut up from the clay. If she were to scrape bottom on one of these, she would never hear the end of it from her father, he hated it when anything happened to the car.

She stops then and locks the car against merry men in the forest around and steps out into the really real world. Behind her windshield she can convince herself that the trees and the path and the clouds and the sun are a movie playing before her, inside she controls the score and the air conditioning is more than cold comfort.

Out here she is an actor, the winds tug at her hair in a playful way and she wraps her coat more tightly around her body because winter’s bitterness still ensconces spring like a shroud yet to be cast aside. She bows her head and walks into the wind, making her way up the winding path as it twists like a crawling serpent upwards.

The trees begin to thin out and she knows that a clearing is coming. It slowly opens before her, the bare branches giving way to an open field of swaying yellow grasses. In the middle stands a cabin, abandoned, a dark brown more in common with the forest behind her than the vibrancy of the grasses that surround it.

It has no roof, the charred beams that push up from the frame claw black at the clouded sky, struggling for purchase amongst the white. Fire took this home from the world and she can imagine it: flames loving this place intensely for one night before casting it aside.

The sun has moved higher in the sky and she turns to leave. She promised she’d meet her mother for lunch; they have a lot of planning to do.

II

Shaun is not a sentimental man, that’s why it’s been so long since he’s been to the cabin. He isn’t even certain himself why he is going. When his wife asks him whether or not he has a particular destination in mind for his walk that autumn afternoon, he tells her no, but is convinced that he will be seeing the cabin before nightfall. As he walks up that country road, his thoughts should perhaps be upon trips with his father along the selfsame trail, parking his truck at the base of the mountain and reaching the clearing around the cabin in the darkness before dawn.

Instead, he thinks about how much his back has been hurting him, how walking wasn’t helping, no matter what the doctors said. He thinks about that dull ache and the way he needs to be especially careful on this odd little side road because he could slip up on any one of these rocks and twist an ankle and then he’d really be in a jam. He wonders whether he’ll miss all of this, the trees with their curled red and brown leaves and the slight chill in the air that worked at the back of his throat. He’s not sure, and it’s odd for him to have a thought that isn’t certain.

When he reaches the cabin there is no flood of warm memories, although perhaps there should be. Instead he sees a rotted out old husk: an old log dinosaur eaten by fortune’s fire from the inside out, leaving only a shadow of what it was standing in the world.

He sighs as he stands there in the chill, old wool jacket hanging off his bones. The sun glows low and red in the cloudy sky but he’s not worried about making it back before nightfall. He’s made this walk plenty of times in his life and he’s certain he’ll do it again.

At least once.