“You know what.”
His eyes drop and he kicks at the dirt just outside the doorway, like he knows he’s said too much. “Didn’t see anything,” he answers. We both know the penalty for going beyond the perimeter, the panic it would cause among the community, the ritual he would face: packed dirt and blood and bound wrists. He didn’t just risk his life by walking past the boundary, he risked it by returning, and now by telling me.
“I won’t say anything,” I say now, to reassure him.
He nods, eyes half-lidded like drowsy moons. We’ve known each other a long time, and maybe that’s why he’s told me this story. Or maybe he’s just tired—let it slip without meaning to.
A moment of quiet falls between us and the chair settles as I shift my weight back, taking another long gulp of the coffee, the liquid less bitter now—my taste buds already familiar with the grit and ash of it.
“Why you asking about the road?”
The jittery pulse of caffeine begins to thrum through me. “Just curious,” I say.
“You know you can’t go out there,” Parker warns now, raising a blond eyebrow at me, as if it were a pointed finger. “You can’t go past the boundary.”
No shit, I think. At every weekly gathering, we’re reminded of the dangers waiting inside the woods. And our job—our post at the gate—is meant to keep any outsiders who might wander up the road from getting in. From bringing the rot over our borders. We keep watch. We protect. But in all the years I’ve sat inside the hut, I’ve never seen a single person striding up the road to Pastoral.
I shoot Parker a look, a half smirk, like my question was only a joke. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” And I settle back into the chair, making myself look perfectly content to stay put, ignoring the lump rooted in my stomach. The lie so easily told.
He eyes me a moment longer, like he doesn’t believe my gesture of ease, as if he senses something stirring along my thoughts, a thing I’ve been thinking for far too long: What if I could make it down the road? What if I could make it through the trees to the outside? To the world that lies beyond?
Parker lets out a low, deep breath. “Okay, I’m heading back, need to get some sleep.” He tips his head. “Keep watch for Olive and Pike’s chickens, they’ve been burrowing out of their coop the last few days. Coyotes might get ’em if they wander past the perimeter.”
I nod. “Our job as community security is never done.”
Parker waves a hand dismissively then turns in the doorway, stepping out onto the road. I listen to the sound of his feet thumping sleepily against the dirt, making the half-mile walk up the road into the heart of Pastoral, until they fade in with the dark and are gone completely.
My thumb traces the edge of the mug.
I peer out at the road, at the path that leads away from Pastoral to a world I’ve never seen.
I leave the mug on the desk and stand up, walking through the doorway onto the road. The gate beside the hut is rusted and locked in place—it’s been too long since someone new has arrived safely to Pastoral.
I breathe in the mild night air, the scent of lilacs blooming in the ditch beside the road, and stare out into the dark. Into the nothing beyond the road.
I take a step past the gate. Then another.
I push my hands into my pockets and think about Parker’s story, about chasing his dog past the boundary. Calla would be furious if she knew what I have been thinking for too long now, the notions crackling along synapses, the idea I can’t shake—that’s tugged at me for the last year. Maybe longer.
But she hides things from me too—buried thoughts beyond her water-deep eyes. A part of my wife she keeps hidden, a feeling I can’t put words to, but I sense it there all the same.
I look back at the gate, the tiny, cramped guard hut where I’ve sat nearly every night for too many years, too many seasons—snow and biting autumn winds and the heat of summer when not even a breeze slips through the doorway to cool my overheated flesh. How many hours have I spent in that room, drinking the same ash-coffee, staring out at this stretch of road, wondering.
I walk to the edge of the road and find a small stone in the tall reeds. I pick it up; my heart already beginning to batter my rib cage. With the stone held in my right hand, I walk away from the guard hut, down the dirt road, careful that my boots are quiet against the dirt.
I walk away from my post.
I leave Pastoral.
* * *
The border of Pastoral is marked by a wood fence along the right side of the road, and nailed to the last post is a hand-painted sign that reads: PRIVATE PROPERTY.
The sign is pointless—no one has come this way in over ten years. No one has made it through the dense forest. And if they did, they’d surely be sick with rot, and we couldn’t allow them through anyway. It’s not safe like it used to be. Still, I step across the boundary, and into the land that exists outside Pastoral: the place we do not cross.
But this is not the first time.
I walk five paces and stop at the misshapen rock placed on the road. The first time I set the rock here—over a year ago now—I remember my heart beating wildly and my breathing so loud I feared someone from the community would hear me. I crouched down and quietly placed the rock on the dirt road—marking how far I had made it—then I sprinted back to the safety of the gate and the hut. I didn’t go down the road for a week after that—I was too terrified. Instead, I would stare in the bathroom mirror each morning and lean close to the glass, examining my eyes, looking for something that wasn’t right: for the black of my pupils to expand like mud seeping up from the earth. I was looking for signs of the disease.