There are no houses here, but still she can’t find her way out of this neighborhood. Mists slowroll through starless three a.m. air, moistening the omnipresent chill. Wandering, side streets lead further into labyrinth, bright streetlamps halo in the fog.
Bleary-eyed, she stumbles over pavement & past blackmetal mailboxes, knowing she won’t start again if she stops to rest, wondering if she’ll find a home at the end of one of these driveways. If she could grab hold of a few mistwisps, inhale them back in, she could recall how she got here. Recall where here is. Who she is. When.
Her bare feet can’t taste the blood anymore, numbing despite the rocks scattered across the road. In whispers & fragments, she sees them: young girls & old women & every age between & beyond, skittering & giggling past her periphery. A walking, gasping corpse. But when her chilled toes point in their direction, they’re only echoes of fog drifting through the starless night. Only heavy, damp silence settling low in her ears.
She’d shout to shatter the quiet, but that mist devoured her voice, every scream & murmur. Her legs stiffen, aching in time with the hollow in her heart, but she knows to push on. To stop walking, searching for some way out of this vacant neighborhood, is to cease being.
If only it could seem someone, some eyes somewhere, were watching—that she weren’t so horribly, agonizingly alone. Even a minotaur in this maze. A nightmare to chase her, give her something at least to run from. But there’s no one & no thing—just these driveways & mailboxes with no homes. Just her, meandering through bleary lamplight, shivering in the void.
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Nayt Rundquist (they/them) is managing editor of The Kenyon Review. Their odd scribblings have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and shortlisted for the Brave New Weird anthology. You can find their little weirdos in Inverted Syntax, Digging Through the Fat, Roi Fainéant, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Scavengers Lit Mag, The Citron Review, and others. They live just outside space and time with their artist-jeweler wife and their fifth-dimensional dogs.