The Fork
You choose the ending…
All writing is only finished once the reader has done their part. You bring your experience and perspective to the story I begin—it's you, dear reader, who finishes it.
This one gives you two paths. You may choose either. You may choose both. But the choosing is yours, and so, I think, is whatever you make of it afterward.
Iris had done the math on this trail before she ever laced up. Four miles in, four miles back, daylight until 7:40 if the forecast held. She always did the math. It’s the kind of thing Darren used to make fun of her for—you don't need a spreadsheet to go for a walk, Iris—right up until the night she needed exactly that kind of thinking to get out of his apartment before he came back from wherever he'd stormed off to. She hadn't run. She'd left, calmly, with her shoes already on because she'd done the math on that too, three weeks before she ever needed to use it.
That was four years and one restraining order ago. She no longer had to deliberately avoid thinking about Darren anymore. She thought about him the way you think about weather—not a person, just a pressure system that’d passed through and left the ground different underneath.
The Jordan River Pathway was quiet this late in October, past color season; most of the leaf-peeper folks had gone home. She liked it that way. She'd brought an extra liter of water she probably didn't need, she always brought more than she needed, because there was always the low hum of what if someone else out here didn't plan as well as you. No bear spray. She'd looked at it in the outfitter in Boyne and put it back on the shelf—forty dollars for a threat she'd never once, in eleven years of hiking this state, actually seen.
She had a system for people, though. Had built it carefully, the way you'd build a levee, one sandbag of evidence at a time. Cross the trail early if a man was coming toward her alone. Keep her hand loose near her phone, not on it, because fumbling for it too soon came across as afraid and afraid was its own kind of invitation. Say something first, before he could—“morning”, flat, unbothered, a door closing before it opened. It hadn’t ever failed her. She wasn't sure if that meant it worked or that she'd simply never been tested.
The light started going amber around 5:15, the kind of gold that made the beech leaves look wet even though everything was bone dry underfoot. Photographers called it the golden hour and made quite a fuss over it, she’d never quite understood why. She was on the ridge section, the part that ran high along the river before dropping back down through hemlock, when she heard it—not a step―exactly. A displacement. Something moving parallel to her, maybe thirty yards off through the trees, matching her pace in that unhurried way that told her it’d noticed her before she'd noticed it.
She stopped.
It stopped.
She could see a shape now, low and dark against the deadfall, backlit wrong, the sun behind it turning everything into silhouette. Could’ve been a man crouched to tie a boot. Could’ve been a shoulder, a haunch, four hundred pounds of animal deciding whether she was worth the trouble. Could’ve been someone else entirely, someone small, sitting.
Her hand found her phone. No bars, she already knew—hadn't had any since the trailhead. The shape shifted its weight. Waited. Iris ran the math one more time, fast, the way she'd run it in Darren's apartment: what she knew, what she didn't, what it would cost her to guess wrong in either direction.
Then she made a choice.
Now it's yours to make too.