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We have been walking for too long. One foot in front of the other, under floodlights, no stars. We walk through the houses, pass through walls as if our bodies are nothing but suggestions, nothing but lines drawn by some all-seeing, never-reaching, indeterminate thing in a sky we never see.
We walk through the bedrooms that once were part of an inception, that were drawn from and bled in and needed. We walk through the suburbs, where resentment grows in rows, neatly in line with the roads, all black and eyeless and drowned in comings and goings. We walk through a corner store that someone once drove a car through but we can’t remember when because something’s been feeding on our memories since we got here.
I turn to you and the world goes entirely still. This is often how it goes. I turn to you and you disappear. Somewhere else, the world still spins.
I walk through the school yard, kicking old pennies and rolling cruel words into nicely round rocks to roll down a hill. I walk through the glare of a lamppost that begins to shake. I fear it will scatter memories everywhere that I will have to pick up. I walk through a forest split down the middle and traverse the seams of a fence like a small thing, disturbing nobody and nothing. I walk through a smoke-filled garage and go back and forth through the haze like a pendulum that will never reach beyond its constraints.
I walk through an empty community centre and a parking lot filled with fauna and flora that have never existed. They push up through the concrete like it is all they are ever meant to do. I walk through shortcuts and billowing laughter and a memory I thought was gone but find I remember; something to do with a park bench in the rain and a plea.
I walk through a church on the corner of a street and I can hear a prayer, an echoed sentiment, a child’s need for a saviour. I walk through someone else’s grief and a need to believe in something. I walk through three birthdays and six wishes to die. I walk where the words I never said reside, in a hollow place along a path but I can’t remember where it ends and where it begins. I walk on.
I walk into a half-finished tree house and a few wishes for a friend disguised as pennies tossed into a fountain. I walk through many haunted houses, each emptier than the last. I walk on the fringes of confessions and through decaying swing sets, into a world that shrinks when a child gets too far into it, like the forest. I walk through nothing at all. I have been walking for too long.
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H.C Wright is a writer from Ontario with an affinity for all things strange and haunting. Her work has been published in Suburban Witchcraft and she is Editorial Lead at Abhartach Magazine. She can be contacted through a series of intricate rituals or found on Twitter/X at @yearofhauntings.
