The Dark Between Seasons

November in this town had a particular quality of silence — not the absence of sound, but something heavier, a silence with weight. Elias had lived here for forty years and only noticed it this November, the first one without his son.

He walked the river path every morning at six. He had started the habit the week after the funeral, not because he believed in the curative properties of walking, but because the house was unbearable at six in the morning. Grief, he had discovered, was loudest at six in the morning.

The path was two miles of gravel alongside the brown November river. He walked it in both directions and returned home in time for coffee that he made but rarely drank. This was his life now: a series of gestures toward normalcy.

On the third week, he noticed the stones.

They had not been there before — he was certain of this, the way you are certain of the particular geography of paths you have walked hundreds of times. Small stones, placed deliberately along the right side of the path, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone, always at intervals that felt almost mathematical.

He did not know what they meant. He began placing his own.

By December, the two trails of stones stretched the full length of the path. He never saw who placed the others. He told himself it did not matter.

But he began, for the first time in months, to arrive home thinking about something other than his son. He arrived home thinking about the stones.