Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
Nothing exists at 2am
By Gemma CampbellNothing exists at 2am.
I slip the knife from the drawer and lash butter on the bread, the serrated edge shredding a slit out to the crust. “Fuck it!”, I spit and throw my unmade breakfast into a plastic bag which hangs on the door handle – in lieu of a bin. The reverberating hum from the open refrigerator pulls my gaze upon its dull white glow, mimicking the daylight that is yet to come. With a weighted push, I slam the door and beckon the room to darkness. Pacing over cracked linoleum, I drag myself to the hallway, force my arms into patinaed leather sleeves and stomp my feet into muddied trail boots. The smell of rust whisps past my nose as I clang the key into the door and unlock.
Cold air at this time of day feels like a personal attack. Even more so in the middle of May. I begin to wonder why I differentiate between winter and summer clothes, when here The Seasons change hourly. By afternoon – or autumn, I’ll regret not tying up my hair as the wind wraps it around my face, a single strand getting caught between my lips for me to blindly feel around for and extract by tweezing from between my teeth. The universe’s way to promote dental hygiene if like me you woke up too early to function anywhere past a two-minute brush. I promise to floss tonight - if I make it back home.
I live in a corner of the countryside where people don’t believe in streetlights, and every second house you pass smells like chicken shit. There is an endless path that flows from my doorstep and into the woods. The path wasn’t put there by anyone, but it was made by footsteps. The remnants of years, it would seem, of people trailing in the same direction, drawing directly into the Earth. Though for as long as I’ve lived here, that is coming up to twenty-eight years, I’ve never seen anyone walk it.
As a child I would sneak out to follow the path from my doorstep and past the neighbours’ house, always being caught by my Mum or by Jim, the neighbour, who would sternly tell me the woods weren’t safe and to stick to the fields if I wanted to play. Years went by of gazing up this enigmatic path never knowing where it led. I used to think that it might lead to a village of fairies, deep in the woods, and that the only reason I wasn’t allowed to go there was that the fairies were shy and afraid of things like us – humans, that is. And who could blame them.
I asked my mum, the night before she passed, if she had ever been up to the woods. She told me that she had never been herself, but she knew someone who had. My mum used to have an older sister, my Auntie Leigh, I never met her because she died long before I was born. I had seen pictures of her as a kid, playing in the field outside our house, and I remember noticing the path was there even then. What my mum told me that night was that my Auntie Leigh had snuck away into the woods when she was thirteen, and she never returned.
People went looking for her, but she was never found, some of them would come back saying that the woods were just too vast, and it would be impossible to find anyone in there. But some of those people started going missing too. Eventually the search was called off on account of it being too dangerous and my mum had to accept that her sister was gone. Something was in those woods, and I was going to find it.
Moss is a disease that spreads between the woods, and this one is positively riddled with it. The path beneath my feet becomes a gritter, covered with leaves and twigs, but it stretches on. As the trees grow thicker and loom over my head I can’t even tell if the sun is close to rising, there is nothing but the woods. I need to peer with daggered eyes and shuffle my feet along the dirt to ensure I’m still on the path. I listen for the sound of birds or insects to guide me through, but sound has become void inside this labyrinth. I squeeze between clustered columns of trees, and I hope that at the very least my sense of smell will strengthen from sensorial depravity so I can find my way back home again. My stomach groans and I suddenly regret rage quitting on my toast, who knows how far this path will lead me, or if I’ll even find the end.
What if it just keeps going and going and I end up exactly where I started? What if it takes me all the way through the woods and out the other side, across the farms and back towards my little empty house? Why would the path start there, on my doorstep? So far, I have not found any indication or reason why anyone would walk to and from-or just to, these woods so often that the gravity of their steps leaves a trace behind. And, if someone is walking to and from, why have I never seen them, and why is there nothing here!
Nothing. Just trees and twigs, and moss, and more moss, and this path beneath my feet that tells me there must be something, but no, there’s no single thing.
SNAP.
Just a twig. It’s just a twig. It’s just a twig I stepped on but -
SNAP.
that noise, it sounded heavier-
SNAP.
I haven’t moved my feet why am I hearing it agai-
SNAP.
It’s coming from the spot where I have placed my foot but-
SNAP.
I can’t lift it to look-
SNAP.
I’m trying to move but it feels frozen like I’ve stepped into a trap-
SNAP.
Where am I, is this still the woods?
SNAP.
I don’t feel huger anymore, I don’t feel much of anything. Physicality is something I’m starting to forget entirely, the only thing I have to remind me of it is, in the most stomach-churning way, myself. Every twenty-seven-and-a-half years, I see myself. Walking up that hill, trudging through the moss and trees, desperate to find something, only to find that something was me.
Every twenty-seven-and-a-half years, I watch myself fall into this, this nothingness. This space between living and dying, right here in the woods. Sometimes it happens in the same fashion, breaking my leg on that stick and being stuck in here, alone, to die. Sometimes I walk right through myself and choke on my own ghost.