Micro Monday - September 16, 2024
Cross A Stranger's Tracks
Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly 100-word story:
Cross A Stranger’s Tracks
Paul stood on his porch with a mug of coffee and watched the snow erase the footprints in his yard.
They didn’t belong to him, which meant someone had crossed this way after it snowed last night. Nobody had stolen anything; the locks on the outbuildings glittered with frost. Still, the footprints scared him.
His father, dead twenty years, came floating back:
Cross a stranger’s tracks, you’re bound to meet. And there are things in these woods you don’t want to meet.
Paul finished his coffee and went inside. Waited for the snow to make the world safe again.
I had the idea for this one while at a yarn store, of all places. A snowflake motif made me think of that first blanket of clean, unbroken snow - and how unnerving it would be to see a line of footprints in your yard that didn’t belong to you. That gave me the first image, which I dutifully transcribed, but I didn’t really know where the story would go from there.
The following morning, I read Six Winter Privacy Poems by Robert Bly. I didn’t seek them out; they were the first in a collection that I happened to pick up at a vintage bookstore weeks ago. But they fit the themes of winter and solitude, that line where being alone hasn’t yet crossed over into loneliness.
I like Paul, but I wonder how long he’ll last. Will he spend the entire winter alone in his cabin, afraid to cross paths with the stranger in his yard? Or will loneliness prove the greater fear? Hard to say, but I hope he enjoys his morning coffee in the meantime.