Mystery Surrounds Whereabouts of Albany Man, 49 | Edward Barnfield

Buying water in the service plaza, he is struck by the sheer range of color that American retail has employed. All the shades are here: bright orange soda cans, chips in blue, red and purple. There is even dill pickle jerky on the shelves, in jet black packs with a cartoon moose grimacing on the side. 

He realizes that he won’t see such a spectrum again, that he is voluntarily submerging himself in earth tones, so he takes a moment. Everything in the shop is manmade and mass-produced – the processed, corn-syrup-stuffed delicacies; the tinny love song on the speakers – and yet it all feels so oddly comforting. He pays the girl at the counter, who is young and has a new-looking nose stud that sits in inflamed flesh, and he’s hit by such a wave of tenderness that he almost reaches out to her. Instead, he gives her the correct change, and she says,

“Y’all come again.”

And he wonders if that is the last human contact of his life. 

Back at the car, he does a final check on his backpack. There is his water, and apples in brown paper. Twine. A rain poncho. His father’s knife. A part of him that wants to abandon the bag in the vehicle alongside his driver’s license and wallet, to renounce all aspects of civilization at once, but he realizes the impracticality of that impulse. 

‘This is not a suicide,’ he has written on the card he leaves on the dash. 

He ditches the car in the furthest spot in the north corner. From there, it is an easy jump over the fence into the state forest. He knows that this section stretches across 8,000 acres, with no roads or logging allowed. It is officially designated as wilderness, as though the land needed federal permission. 

The first stretch is more difficult than he had expected, the trees leaning close, roots and branches that tug and trip. It’s hard to find purchase, and even when he does, some unruly twig will poke an eye or whip an ear. 

Within ten minutes he has passed from all sounds of highway traffic, from any trace of signs or concrete. He stops for a moment, leans against bark. Already, there is a welt on his wrist from some over-eager mosquito, and he smiles as he scratches. More of those to come. 

There are still wild places in the world, he thinks. If he travels deep enough, it will be as though he is shedding centuries, moving back before the skyscrapers and the spaceships and the settlers. 

 “What will we be when we aren’t what we are?” he whispers.  

The forest moves with the weather, alternating between stillness and motion. He tries to move with it. 

Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, Strands Publisher, Janus Literary, Leicester Writes, Cranked Anvil, and Reflex Press, among others. In 2021, he won the Exeter Literary Festival and Bay Tales short story prizes. He’s on Twitter at: @edbarnfield