THE LONG WALK BACK

The sky on the day he left was black, threatened by the idea of rain, but not yet promised it. 

Everything he owned fit into a suitcase as tattered and worn as he was. Some clothes, the ones that survived the final meltdown, two pairs of shoes, and the only four books he’d ever bothered to read and memorize like the back of his own hand. These things were all he owned, in the end, aside from the four-hundred dollars folded into his stained leather wallet. He threw it into the glovebox before shutting all the doors and getting behind the wheel. He took one last look at the too-bright white of a house painted on the inside with bruises and cigarette smoke and promised to every sort of God or being that was listening that he would never, ever come back.

He had not told his friends he was leaving, and his parents had long died and left him alone on the earth with no siblings, and thus he had no one else to tell. Not that it really mattered, anyway; the man he is leaving behind would have found a way to make it his fault, even if the finger that pointed was facing in the wrong direction. He scoffed. His fingers tightened on the wheel as he leaned an arm on the passenger seat and backed out of the gravel driveway, the tiny rocks rumbling like the thunder that rattles the window of his car as he put the house in his rear-view mirror and kept it there.

Anywhere but here, he told himself, all at once exuberant and terrified of a life unknown. Anywhere but here. 

He drove for a long time, the roads out of the countryside paved and painted but long and dull with little scenery. It would be nightfall before he ever reached the beginning of the woods, and he was both spooked by and excited about this. For now he was content to mark the passage of time not with the green flickering LED of his dashboard clock but by the fields that whizzed by as they raced him: corn, cotton, corn, tobacco, wheat, corn again. Hot, sticky air beaded moisture on the arm he hung out of the window as he drove, eyes squinted against the brutal shining of a sun that turned into a burning coin and halved itself against the horizon line. Every so often the chest-high stalks of corn from the fields would throw finger-like shadows across his face and in the inbetween dark, he would smile.

It was just before the sun disappeared entirely that the shape appeared by the side of the road up ahead. At first he thought it had been a scarecrow, placed haphazardly by the roadside and tilted as though it was watching for cars, arm stuck out just far enough over the blacktop to be visible when he squinted at it. But it did not move like a scarecrow, and it occurred to him then that it moved—just has he was about to slam the gas pedal to speed by the shambling thing, he realized that it wasn’t a scarecrow, but a young man, messy hair whipping in the wind that had kicked up and holding a thumb out over the road.

He slowed to a stop. He hadn’t necessarily intended to give the kid a ride, but he didn’t protest when the kid hauled his backpack higher up a shoulder and reached for the door to yank it open with an ear-splitting creak. He let the engine idle and watched in a disjointed sort of awe as the cat-eyed boy slammed the door closed and settled his backpack between his knees. 

Thanks, the kid said, his voice thick with an accent. He wanted to ask but felt that it would be rude to do so, and so he did not. 

Where are you going? 

Dunno. 

Then why are you hitchhiking? 

I have somewhere to be.

But you don’t know where it is? 

The kid’s small eyes glanced over at him but quickly returned to the frayed edges of his jeans at his knees. No, he said. But I will know it when I see it. 

Okay. 

He looked away from the frail boy in his passenger seat and kept driving. 

The sun finally sank, taking the light with her and in her place drawing up a thick, star spotted curtain of black. The city in which he intended to make it to would not arrive for hours, and so, for the time being, it was just them. The car, the radio, the road. The silence between them felt physical and for a reason he could never explain until the day he died he felt a reason to disturb it.

So, where are you from? 

Around. 

Not from here? 

This counts as around, doesn’t it? 

He laughed. The kid that he had picked up who had been silent and seemed withdrawn into himself like a stray cat smiled also. It touched him in a way he had not expected, and he thought that maybe he had not lost himself completely, after all. 

I guess you’re right. 

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, I am not from anywhere. 

What do you mean? 

The kid tilted his head back against the bench seat and blinked at the ceiling. 

I mean, that I am not from anywhere. I have no home to go to. No family.

How’d you get here if you don’t have family?

How did you? 

Fair point. In a way that felt like fate, he had no family, either. Part of him wondered if the kid knew that and that’s why he brought it up. 

Regardless, the silence continued. He watched the moon from the corner of his eye as she pulled herself up from the black like a perennial drown victim. He watched her spill her milky light over the fields, turning them to shadowed, washed out things in silence punctuated only by the sound of the tires on the road and their mixed, steady breathing. The kid was not asleep and he wondered what he was really doing. Either of them. 

As if he sensed it, the kid sighed and turned his head toward the window. With a cursory glance he saw that his hair was longer than he thought, tucked behind his ears and curled beneath a strong jaw. Moonlight illuminated a long neck and threw bruising shadows across his face as he spoke. 

I am on my way to a funeral, he said. 

I’m sorry. For who? 

My father.

I’m sorry. 

It’s alright. I don’t know how he died.

You don’t? 

No. I have not seen them—both my parents, I mean—in a long time. That is why I don’t know where I’m going, but that I will know it when I see it. 

Silence resumed, but it made him feel odd. The kid had given up something about himself without being asked and it felt both foolish and selfish to not do the same. 

My father died, too. A long time ago. So did my mom. 

Really? My condolences. 

Thanks. 

Death is so strange, isn’t it? the kid said, still looking out the window, no more present than someone he would meet in passing on the street, and yet curiously real. 

It’s so unpredictable, yet predictable, because we all will die. A life ends to make room for a new life to begin. 

He didn’t respond, but he smiled. How poignant. 

The moon had climbed to infinity overhead when the kid suddenly sat up in his seat and pointed out of the windshield at something in the middle of the road.

What the hell is that? 

He saw it, too, and slammed on his brakes. The headlights flickered a bit as he tried to keep the car in control, only fishtailing a little before righting himself and throwing the car into park. His own breath was heavy but the kid’s was heavier, nervous in the passenger seat, hand lowering as the engine ticked and idled. 

The headlights, steady now, poured out into the night, strong as they fell upon the shape standing still just ahead of them, then fizzling out in a gaussian blur beyond it. They cut into the shape of it, illuminating it in valleys of shadow and light. It stood there, unmoving, four legs and two yellow eyes that reflected the pale yellow of the headlights like high beams. 

It was a dog. As dark and still as death.

It stood there and watched them, eyes unblinking, head turned toward them as though it had been merely taking a leisurely stroll across the small road just before the woods and they had so rudely interrupted it. And yet it felt sinister. The eyes that watched, the ears that listened, the paws that felt. It was a collective groan of fear disguised as irritation. He honked the horn to scare it away and it did not flinch. 

It was an omen. Of this he was certain. 

The kid did not move and said nothing as he leaned out of the window to shout at it, mostly variations of move, go home, go away, and with every word the heart in his chest beat harder, louder; the dog’s eyes followed him like a painting in a shadowed hallway as he honked and shouted for it to leave. Hair stood up on the back of his neck when he saw that the pupils were sideways slits, the unnatural eyes of a goat in a dog’s body.

Why doesn’t it seem scared? The kid finally asked. 

He did not have an answer for that. If the question had been why he felt so scared, then perhaps. But not for the strange dog. For that, he felt there were no answers, that there had been no answers since the dawn of time, and there would be no answers for as long as the planet spun on her axis. It felt otherworldly. Alien. It did not belong here and yet here it was, watching them, waiting.

Waiting. 

 Just as he was about to lay on the horn again and throw the car into gear to go around it, the massive head swung on a strong neck and looked away. The both of them watched in a terrified awe as it trotted across the rest of the road and disappeared into the wheat. It left nothing behind except the memory of fear and the goosebumps on their arms and legs. 

That was fucking scary, the kid said. 

He laughed. It wasn’t particularly funny, but he laughed. 

Later, as the moon began to climb back down from her post with the sun chasing her on the other side,  a lonely sign on the side of the road alerted them that there would be a gas station in five miles. He intended to stop there to gas up, but did not want to stop for anything else. Despite being three hundred miles away already from the life that was defined by open-palmed slaps to bruised cheeks and shouting matches, he did not want to linger in a place that lets ghosts remain and stain their presence in the doorways.

The kid had not fallen asleep even though he had expected him to. He merely sat in the passenger seat with his face toward the window, bathing in moonlight, tired eyes blinking. The lights of the tiny gas station were ultra-bright in the dark of the night like a void. His small cat’s eyes squinted until he pulled the car up to a lonely pump and then he blinked himself awake. 

Though he had not noticed at first, he did when he finally leaned against the car and looked around. The entire lot was empty of cars. A fluorescent light burned harshly inside the small store, but there was no visible attendant, and he questioned if the buzzing neon OPEN sign in the window was true or not. Not a single car except for his own loitered in the lot. It occurred to him then that they were very, very alone. 

Oh, god, the kid groaned. He had gotten out of the car and was leaned against the door in a mirror of his own stance. He turned around and followed the line of the kid’s finger to where it pointed at a shape standing statue still in the center of the gas station.

The dog was still as black as a void. It seemed to suck up the harsh lights of the outside pumps and store it inside itself, an unholy black, a rip directly in the fiber of the universe stitched in the shape of a dog too big to be real. The yellow goat eyes settled in a canine face watched them again, never moving. 

Why doesn’t it have a shadow?

What? 

The kid pointed at the dog. It stood like a stone, just as it had in the road, and it neither moved nor breathed to indicate that it was alive. But had they not seen it walk away? How could it be here with them, hours and hours beyond the place they had come upon it? Horror bloomed like a sickly flower in the empty pit of his ribcage where a heart should be.

It doesn’t have a shadow, the kid said. It isn’t casting a shadow. 

He was right. The shape of the dog was not reflected on the dirty pavement of the gas station in an opaque outline. The dog just seemed to exist not here and not there but in the space between, the walker of worlds. 

Which one of them was it following? 

Come on, he said. The kid hastily got into the car beside him and closed his eyes.

He did not see it, but as they pulled away, the dog began to walk. 

It haunted him in a way that his old life did not, but he didn’t mention it, not wanting to scare the kid who still had not slept. He often wondered as the moon sank lower and the sun began to lighten the sky if he had been too scared to sleep, afraid that the black dog would appear in his dreams, no longer still but snarling with hot, red blood raining from its jowls. But perhaps the kid was just not tired and it was himself who was afraid. 

The fields turned to wood and then back again. Chest high stalks waved lightly as the wind blew back and forth. The black clouds that had signalled the end of whatever he had begun the previous day had mostly disappeared, only visible on a distant horizon that drowned the moon in light as the sun broke. 

They had not spoken since the gas station, and where this might have bothered him before, it no longer did. It seemed to matter less and less as the car drove on; they had experienced this thing together, this phantom dog with the wrong eyes and the universe painted on its coat, and no other thing, not even loss, could separate them from it. Years from now he would be able to recall the way the boy's lips curled in a smile when he thought about the dog they had seen that casted no shadow. He would remember him often, the boy with a heavy tongue and no home, and wonder what it could have been; if home was a place that was given to you, or if it was a place that you chose. 

The fields stretched on just a little further before they became wood again and, beyond that, more field. He wondered if it would ever end or if he had just been driving in circles, but then the boy pulled his backpack into his lap and sat up. 

He pointed. There, he said. That’s where I’m going. You can drop me here. 

Here? He said. But there’s nothing. 

Do you see the gap in those trees? Like it is the beginning of a path? There. I’m going there.

Into the woods? You know, I can just take you where you need to go.

But the kid shook his head. Remember how I told you that I didn’t know where I was going but that I would know it when I see it? 

Yes.

Finally the kid looked at him straight on. It was a curious thing, to see him like this after so long, and the honey brown of his irises would stay with him long after the kid had left. 

I see it. 

Goosebumps erupted across his arms and neck and an inexplicable dread pooled in his stomach. But he pulled to the shoulder and allowed the kid to get out, which he did with little more than a gentle touch to his shoulder and a quiet thank you. He would remember that moment for a very long time. 

He stayed, engine idling, as the kid adjusted his backpack on his shoulders and began to walk away, shoes crunching on gravel until it was no longer audible. A strong wind that seemed to come from nowhere whipped across the surface of the field, bending the long stalks of wheat in a bow. With it came a shadow that passed along the back of the window and the side of the car.

The dog was back, only this time it was not standing still, but trotting along at a pace that seemed almost too normal for something of its stature and nature, as though it was a loyal friend to the boy that it followed. The massive paws made no sound as it lumbered along the shoulder, paced behind the boy as if it had walked this same way for miles, following them and yet somehow always with them all at once. The dread that he had felt only grew until it hurt to breathe. The kid did not notice the dog. The dog turned its head once to look back at him, goat’s eyes steady, before the head swiveled back and forgot him. This, too, was an omen.

He waited until the kid disappeared between the trees, the dog-shaped void swallowing up the light behind him.

He drove away and did not look back.

Two years later, in a new city in a new state with a new life, he would be sitting in a coffee shop not far from his new apartment on a day he did not work and would read the paper. In it he would find an article, mostly hidden, no longer front page news. It would tell him that the police had found the remains of a young man in the woods not far from here. He had disappeared ten years earlier on the way to his father’s funeral.

I don’t know where I am going, but I will know it when I see it. 

I see it.

Outside, a black dog with the wrong eyes and a coat as black as death waited.