A road, long, narrow, its incline a melancholy dip into darkness, lay ahead of me. It had begun nowhere, winding through murky shadows of tree trunks, slipping through its own furtive brushes with a dead wind, losing itself in its own despair. A despair that may just as well have been called happiness.
Everywhere, a heavy silence hung dusted with the frozen powder of coal. Once a bus thundered by, but I didn’t see it. I didn’t look.
Nothing changed as I walked. It was the middle of November. The dead, speechless branches of November.
It was exactly what I wanted.
I had scaled the tallest hill I could find that afternoon; I had conquered it in all its stoic, unforgiving hardness, and cut my name crudely in the splintered wood of a signpost. After that, I had no more ambitions. I stared at my name in the post, and the rough letters were suddenly no more intelligible than the bizarre Cyrillic characters pointing the way to towns that perhaps no longer existed. I turned down the path the most easily discernible in the morbid leaves, with neither knowledge nor hope that I would ever see the living world again. But then, it didn’t really matter. I was immortal.
The path never ended. It wound quietly down along the side of the hill, at times a mere depression in the thick layer of leaves, at times naked in its gritty blackness. When and where it spilled itself out onto the asphalt road, I can’t remember. I don’t think I ever noticed. The road came out of nowhere on the left, and continued on into nowhere on the right. The sun was already behind the hill: a few last fading breaths of light wrapped around the miserable heap of dirt I was walking on, and coughed leftover shreds of visibility at my feet.
I looked up then, and skittered a little. Two figures were slowly peeling themselves away from the shadows. They came toward me, nameless. A man and a woman, their dress as lifeless as the countryside; their hands didn’t touch but hung stiffly by their side. The man looked into my eyes as he passed, and there, I saw nothing. An old, empty nothing, devoid of dreams and passions, because none had ever been there.
I didn’t glance after them. They passed like the countless trees, like the rotting stumps and sterile rocks along the road, impressing themselves upon my memory as shadows, vague, untouchable, lost. I forgot them instantly.
The road was long. My footsteps had become inseparable from one another—I could not tell if ever my feet left the pavement, only to descend upon it again in an endless string of echoes. A few times, a car sputtered by. The color faded, the tires rubbed useless by years of gravel roads. Windshield wipers ripped out of their sockets for the last time, sold in the black further East: they are, after all, a luxury. I wasn’t sure if I should be desperate at the light falling all around me, and thought indulgently of sticking my thumb out into the numb air. But the car had already slipped away irretrievably into the shapeless mist. I plodded on.
The rest of this short story is in print and eBook format… right here