Moss Skyscrapers

Same Walk, Different Shoes (Bonus Post)

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

“What do we do next, Grandma?” I asked. The pot on top of the fire was ready. The water was already beginning to move, to sizzle, turning into a living thing. Before long, it would be jumping.

“Fill it,” she said, and that was all, because that was all my Grandma ever gave.

Each word was an effort for her. I could feel it in her, in the way she held steadfastly onto the carved wooden walking stick even when sitting now; in the way she kept her grey hair back behind her ears and scratched into something approximating a bun instead of adorning it with flowers; in the way her sentences had contracted to one word or two since Grandpa died.

Then again, maybe it hadn’t had anything to do with Grandpa. I hadn’t been there when it happened. I hadn’t seen it. Maybe her transformation had come earlier.

But I could only picture her strong and tall and smiling, with flowers in her hair, before he was gone. I’d come home to this.

Perhaps Grandpa was one half of her essence, the fun half, and he’d taken it with him.

I looked up at the dried herbs hanging from the beams of our ceiling and pointed hopefully. A beam of sunlight highlighted dust motes spiralling down over my outstretched finger, but Grandma only sighed and shook her head. She harrumphed like an old horse and looked down at the fizzing water.

So, not something from inside our home.

I walked over well-worn and smooth planks to reach for the iron handle of the door, the metal cold and harsh against my hand. I hesitated for a moment, anticipating another clue, but Grandma was watching the floor.

I took a breath of summer sunlight air and stepped outside, letting the door close on Grandma behind me.

Out here was still sunbeams and butterflies and wild deer, no matter how dark and gloomy it was in there. I walked down the path that led towards the trees, sticking to the flagstones out of habit until they petered out to leave me standing on soft and bouncy fallen needles. The carpet of leaves felt alive, like the earth could breathe, like it might at any moment decide to flip me up into the air and land me on my back.

I had picked up the woven basket from beside the door, and its weight was comforting on my arm. The interlaced twigs creaked a little as I moved, a reminder that this, too, had once been living. Everything out here was like that.

Grandma had insisted I leave my cell phone at the gas station by the highway, then walk to the cabin without it or any other thing touched by a machine.

I spotted toadstools growing at the base of a tree and stopped to pluck a few; their caps were brown and stems faded brown to white, so they were safe to eat. I’d learned quickly how to tell them apart from the other kind.

It was funny, what you could do without a phone. I’d grown up with the thing, grown into it, thought it was as much a part of me as my fingers or my eyes. But it turned out, it wasn’t part of me at all. Leaving it behind made me lighter, not heavier.

The things I thought I needed – Granny had shown me quickly, without much of a word, that they were not things that would help me at all.

A small stream burbled not far from the place where our path ended; I remembered stepping over it that first day, barefoot since my shoes were all machine-made, wondering if I was still going in the right direction. On the verge of panic. But who could ever panic beside such a joyful, giggling, lively stream? I bent down to look closer and spotted some roots growing in the water, the kind of roots that you could boil and eat. I plucked a few, then thought and plucked the whole lot. There would be more upstream.

This place was light and air and motion. I spun in a circle and watched a squirrel run up the trunk of a tree, small pointed nose twitching my scent and deciding whether to trust me.

It was the kind of light and air and motion I’d learned to live without, back there.

Funny how the things I thought I never needed were, in fact, the things I needed most of all.

A chattering bird shouted at me and flew away as I moved in to take the berries she had been enjoying, and I cast an apologetic look up the tree towards her nest before taking just a few. I didn’t want her to go without.

A newt splashed from a rock into the stream behind me; I turned to watch, astonished. It had escaped my notice, a perfect statue until my attention was elsewhere. I smiled at the sight of its eye peering above the water as it swam away. Granny would have laughed at it, too, once.

I reached an open clearing where wild garlic grew along the bases of the trees and pulled some for my basket, my eyes open for a rabbit. We’d had one last week; this week, none. I could stay and wait, but Granny had never specified. I didn’t want to see that wild look in its trusting, wide eyes if I stopped and caught one. This, and the potatoes I could grub up from the nascent garden assigned as my own, would do.

I looked up at the cabin as I approached again. Was it lopsided now, or was I only imagining it? For so many years, Grandpa had propped up his side of things. Now he was gone, it was like Granny was folding into herself, disappearing bit by bit. It seemed reasonable for their home to do the same.

I hoped it wouldn’t. I needed somewhere to live, even if Granny didn’t stay here forever. And the more I stayed, the more I thought I might just make my own life in the woods, now I knew what was and wasn’t necessary for a life.

Then again, I could always build my own. Granny knew things, and she would help, even if only in the way of supervision.

I stepped through the door and showed her my basket, but Gran looked away and waved a hand. “In,” she said decisively, derisively. Like I should have known better than to ask her. Like I should have been confident in my own mind.

I was.

I upended the basket over the water and watched it all splash down, becoming part of the life and colour, the bubble and laugh, the light and the shine.

Things had changed so fast out there. Probably because I had the wrong ideas about the things I needed or the things I didn’t need. But here I could breathe change with season, slow and steady, and see the signs written in the air, on the trunks of trees covered with moss, in the cries of birds.

The pot bubbled. Gran took a breath.

“Your Grandpa,” she said. It was the beginning of a sentence, but I had come to expect by now that her sentences would have no ends.

“I know,” I told her. I’d figured out the pattern. It was like reading leaves, but I’d felt my way through it. Mostly through talking endlessly and having her not talk back, realising talking wasn’t what she needed. Not from me. “I won’t be alone forever.”

She lifted her eyes to mine. Coal-black iris, but soft and kind. The Gran I remembered from a long time ago. “How?”

I smiled. I gestured at the door. The flagstones, the trees, the moss, the stream, the gas station, the highway. “What’s that phrase? Life finds a way?”

Gran’s eyebrow beetled down over her eye, flashing purpose. “You.”

Not life. You.

You find a way.

I nodded and smiled again and stirred the pot with a ladle carved from wood. Why would I ever go back? If I was ever going to find the Grandpa to my Gran, I would have to wait for him to come to me. Or her. Or it.

No one knew what the future held. Not even us.

Not even Gran.

I poured the contents of the pot into two bowls and lifted the rest from the fire, setting it aside to cool, letting the fire warm us as the sun went down.

Maybe, I thought, I wouldn’t stay here much longer, after all. There was a change of season in the air, and before long, animals would be moving; leaves falling; clouds scudding. With change came movement, with movement change. I had the pieces now. She had given them all to me. I just had to choose what to do with them.

And make my own pieces.

There was nothing I truly needed to be successful, happy, right – nothing but that.

And the sun streaming down on flowers growing for my hair.

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No progress report this week - I wanted this post to stand on its own.

As soon as I read my prompt, I had a feeling come over me that I recognised - it reminded me of character and setting I’d worked with in a short story years ago, Moss Pavements. This is, then, somewhat of a spiritual successor to that story, if not a direct follow-up. This is normally where I would link to the story, but it looks like the lit mag that published it originally is no longer around, so I’ll have to bring it back in another form at some point! Anyway, it’s sort of an interesting feeling, having the “sequel” out there but not the “prequel” anymore.

If you’re reading this post from the SWDS challenge and you’ve never heard of me before: Crowhill Cove is a spicy, angsty gay romance writing experiment with transparency on progress, sales, and results. I’m currently serialising a novel here, an office CEO/secretary romance called Don’t Move Your Desk. Subscribe if you want to read it for free or uncover in-depth analysis and sharing of everything I’m doing to try to make this all work, from marketing efforts to the actual writing of the books. I try lots of things that don’t work, which is fun for helping fellow writers avoid the same pitfalls. You can even vote on what I’ll write about next.

If you want to check out the rest of my short stories, you can do so here (there is considerably more heat in my average post, so be warned).