On the Way to Elsewhere

by Rudi Dornemann

Some evenings, when Martha went out walking along the gravel roads between the fields, she felt a ghost city growing solid in the cool air. As the fog gathered in the drainage ditches and creek beds, buildings massed in her peripheral vision, terraced, balconied and impossible.

Some nights, rain came down and swept the city from the night. Others, she walked and walked. Her calves grew sore while the buildings grew more present. After weeks her legs grew stronger, but the city remained a pressure at the edge of her vision.

As winter gave way to softer ground, heavy machinery leveled the fields behind plywood signs with the names of stores and franchise restaurants. Martha tried the new roads in every direction, slipped through the gates to trudge the churned earth. She walked on until it was too dark to see anything; the city’s inhabitants walked beside her, and she wouldn’t have known.

When the concrete and asphalt covered the fields, then sprouted a forest of upright girders, she saw the city less often, but more vividly. Once, she found herself in a market crowd between rows of booths hung with bright, unfamiliar objects — but only for the time it took her to gasp in a shocked breath, and then it was only a row of dumpsters along the store-backs. Another time, she thought she saw a hand, beckoning her around a corner and she sprinted to find a food court full of plastic picnic tables.

After the stores opened, after the restaurants filled the air with smells of frying and bulk spices, she kept walking, even though she didn’t see — didn’t sense — anything for weeks.

Then, one fall evening, when it seemed she’d never walked for anything but the exercise, she went into an office supply store and pretended to look at multi-tabbed planners until she warmed up.

As she left, a clerk ran to her. “You forgot this,” he said, “Left it on the glass.”

He pointed to the copiers in a corner of the store.

It was a sheet of 11×17 paper, warm with machine-light, covered with streets and parks and buildings whose terraces she could see as if she remembered them. A map, clearly labeled in her own handwriting.

The Lady or the Tide

by Kat Beyer

If I give it back to her, she will walk all the way down the shining valley to the sea. She will step into the water and never return, if I give it back.

She might not. But I think I know. I’ve heard the stories at closing time down the pub (no one tells them at the start of the night, before the dark and the rain). It might be modern times, we might park a Range Rover where my grandfather kept his cart, but I know—I’m not such a modern educated man that I can’t feel this truth under my skin and hers—it’s what drew me to her, after all.

And I will be left here, to mind our children until they mind themselves, mind themselves away to college and London no doubt, and I am left to grow old sitting in the same patch of sun my father sat in, pining and looking down the valley to the sea.

But if I never say anything, and I leave it hid in the thatch where I first put it, I will have kept a secret from her, my own wife, my heart outside myself.

I once thought to put it in a deposit box at the bank. People in the stories always leave things like this about to be found, it seems. I wanted to be wiser and safer. But the thatch seemed the right place. There is no explaining it, I suppose.

If I never say anything, I will know what she does not. It will be like the secrets some other men in here keep, about women in Oban or Glasgow. The wives who do not know make my heart ache. But then, some of the husbands don’t know either: they make my heart ache too.

I couldn’t have that kind of secret—how could I love anyone else but her? No house has been warmer, no children brighter eyed and sounder hearted. Sometimes with her, one glass of wine seems to last all summer.

She’s away today with the children, up the coast, and I’m standing here, looking down the valley to the water, holding this sealskin in my hand, waiting for the sea and my own heart to return the answer.