They knew it was the last night, we all knew. Bits of snow, stubborn holdouts of a fading winter, here and there gathered on a sidewalk or street corner. To my left was some restaurant. I’d been there before, but no memories of it remained precious to me. It was closed.
We were all leaving anyway.
I walked along the empty street. I’d seen families packing everything into a car or camper. They were going together, those fathers and mothers and children. I’d no one to go with. Maybe that’s why I was still here, strolling through my abandoned town.
It was dark in the restaurant behind the window. Empty booths and tables waited inside where never would men sit. A soda machine, I could just make out its shape through the shadows, waited, abandoned.
There was a notice, quickly printed and taped to the window, warning of today. We had all seen the notices. Time to go home, I supposed. Wandering down the street, I crossed the cold pavement. The sun was setting behind me, and distantly its golden light played upon the mountain ahead. It was still draped in snow, a white canvas rising above the forest ready to reflect the colors of the dying sun.
There was no time left, I thought.
I see my breath in the night, see it fading quickly away. As I walk, I find him beside me, covered in tattered black cloths. I turn to him, give him a half smile, and keep on walking.
“There’s always one,” he tells me. “Why haven’t you gone home?”
I stop. Lifting up my hands I indicate the streets. “I was born here,” I say, “and my parents and their parents . . . A few steps that way is the hospital where I was born. There’s the school I went to. I worked there—”
“But the lease is over,” he chimed in. “You have to go home.”
Pocketing my hands, I shake my head, “I am home.”
We walked together as the night came, and I knew no sun would ever again rise over my home.
Tale Told 