The men in my ears clacked about The Iliad as I walked. I used to pause my podcasts and take out my earbuds when I went walking down Main Street, in case I saw someone. But today it snowed hard so I could not expect that, so I let them clack on about Greece, and the Greeks, and I laughed silently inside puffed cheeks numbed to the cold.
I turned the corner and began up the hill. Around a slight bend a woman was also walking, coming down. She was far; we walked, both knowing we would pass the other, and uncertain what to do in the interim. This knowledge crushed me like a tight squeeze of the calves, like the muscles in my thighs and in my calves were clamped and all the juices were drying up. My muscles became raisins; the men kept clacking, but I took one earbud out, for politeness; I kept my eyes down and pretended like my mind did not race. What if she spoke a cursory, pithy remark about the weather, about the snow and its falling like little powdered sugars from a donut God breathed on, about the funny little happenstance that two people might walk in such conditions? I needed pith in response. I have often lamented my failures in pith. The men clacked; the raisins dried themselves; I stared down and considered the footprints I knew I was leaving but never turned to see.
We passed each other. She smiled, and I laughed as if she said something pithy, and I stuffed the men back into my right ear and let them clack until I died.
Up the hill the road turns blind for a leftbound walker, so I crossed the street, like always: when coming up from town, you round the bend and cross at the treelog mailbox. And I crossed and began walking on her footprints. I knew they were hers; they were fresh, and it was snowing. They were small, too, certainly smaller than my too-big expensive winter boots. I stepped in her footprints, stomped over them, clomped on half of one and none of the next. My boots were larger; my strides were longer; I felt a sense of conquest. A terrible, stupid sense of conquest knocked me on the head like an unwinking brick, and I picked it up and stared at it, waiting for it to realize itself.
-Will Sussbauer
Illustration by Alicia Gan.
