Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Parting Ways

In those days the ways back to the Quarter had changed. Roads torn up, diverted or fallen into general disrepair. The usual approaches no longer worked. In places they followed old road allowances, overgrown and washed out, barely a trail. It took hours to come to a usable road, hours where someone might chance upon them with questions of why they were there. Few were the friendly faces. 

He returned after the war to this changed landscape. Everything felt unfamiliar. Fields abandoned to dust and weeds that he had never known could grow so tall. Even the houses and yards he passed were different than he remembered. Smaller somehow and he immediately noticed all the signs where entropy and decay were creeping in. Had they always been there? The sky was grey and hazy, smoke from some distant fires, which felt familiar in all the wrong ways. 

They greeted him with hugs and tears, an explosion of joy that soon ebbed. His mother kept up a steady stream of chatter, news of people he’d forgotten or didn’t know, anything to ward off the awkwardness they all were aware lurked just below the surface. His father seemed at ease, but that was just his way. His sister was oddly quiet, watching him intently as though she didn’t recognize him. Maybe she didn’t. What are we going to do with you, her expression said.  

She took him outside after dinner and showed him around the yard, pointing out all that had changed. Much had. He didn’t want to say he would have preferred to be alone. The barn they had played in as children had been pulled down, replaced with a new set of corrals. They’d put a shed up on the west end of the yard to provide shelter for calving season and there was a whole series of new pens and lanes stretching down to the alkali slough where they used to leave the deadstock for the coyotes. 

She explained all they’d done, making clear the ideas had been hers, and the improvements that had resulted. He said little in response, which she took as a challenge. The world didn’t stand still while you were gone. No, it hadn’t, he agreed. He couldn’t put into words what he was feeling, how the image of the place he had carried with him through all those terrible days was vanished. Maybe it had never been. 

They always wanted you to take it over, she said. Especially now. But I was the one who wanted to be here. You always wanted to go. 

Had he? It was hard to remember the person who had ventured out. At some point there had been a parting of ways with whoever that was and what had come back was someone else. There were no words to explain that either, so he didn’t and they returned to the house.