Issue 4: Echoes

The One Who Walks at Dusk

Daryl Bruce

The town still whispers about him. Or her. Or it. Nobody knows, and that is the point. The stories have changed, as stories do. When I was a boy, they called it a punishment—an omen that kept restless teenagers in their homes, that turned lovers into liars, that made boys and girls behave. A figure appearing at the edge of the wheat fields when the sky went violet, the last breath of day bleeding into night. Tall, limber, neither a man nor a woman, neither young nor old.

No one could say what it wanted. Some said it had been cast out for wanting the wrong things, that it had been seen at the riverbanks, touching its own face in the black water. That it had been seen at the old chapel ruins, waiting in the pews for something that never came. Others whispered that it had once belonged here. That a long time ago, before the stories grew jagged with fear, it had walked among them. That there had been another name, a real one, before the town refused to speak it aloud. They said if you met its gaze, you would know what it meant to be truly alone.

I was fourteen the first time I saw it. It was late October. The air had the first bite of winter in it. The kind of cold that turned your breath into ghosts. I was walking home from school, past the fields where the wild grass was high, and the dirt road turned to dust under my sneakers. I wasn’t in a hurry. I had learned not to be. If I walked too fast, if I held my hands wrong, if I let my voice rise too light in a laugh, the boys at school noticed—they always noticed. I had spent the last year learning how to move—how to shift my weight so my hips wouldn’t betray me, how to deepen my voice when I said good morning to Mr. Carter at the general store, how to let my shoulders slope just enough to seem careless, but never soft. I was learning how to pass. But the truth is, I wasn’t good at it.

That afternoon, my whole body ached from holding itself the right way for too long, so I let go for a moment. Just a moment. I let my hands loosen, let my walk settle into the way it wanted to be. And that’s when I saw it. A figure at the field’s edge. Static as a cut-out in the dimming light. Tall. Limber. Just as they had said. It was watching me. Something inside me lurched. Not in fear—though fear came next—but in recognition. I had never seen it before, yet I had always known it. It had always known me.

The cold air vanished. The whole world seemed to narrow just to us. I had the terrible feeling that if I moved, it would move too. That if I stopped breathing, it would stop too. That it was waiting. I ran home without looking back.

*** 

The city is loud, full of light, full of people who don’t look twice at you. I remember stepping off the bus my first night and feeling weightless. No one knew my name. No one knew my mother. No one cared how I walked or how I spoke. I was free.

At first, I did all the things I had imagined doing when I lived in that old town. I let my voice relax. I let my hands move vibrantly. I kissed men under gaudy disco balls in clubs packed so tight I could barely breathe. I let them take me home, press me up against doorframes, tangle together in sheets, our bodies slick with sweat. And for a long time, I felt safe.

But then the nights changed. Some nights, I wake up to find the sheets damp beneath me. Not with sweat, but with something heavier, thicker. A clinging wetness that seeps into my skin, into my scalp, into the hollow at the base of my throat. At first, I thought it was a fever. But fevers burn. This is something else. It cools me. It settles inside me like an extra layer of skin. I sit up too fast, and my head pounds, my chest heavy. The air in my apartment feels thick, pressing down. My arms, my legs, my ribs—everything feels like it belongs to someone else, like I am being worn.

Then, there are the other nights. The ones where I wake with my window open. Where I find footprints in the dust by my bed. Where I feel it before I open my eyes. Something hovering over me, long and murky, its shape familiar, its breath damp against my forehead. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak. But I know what it wants. It lingers. I do not move. I cannot. It doesn’t hold me down. It doesn’t need to.

My fingers tremble as I touch my skin, my ribs, my neck, searching for something that isn’t there—something that shouldn’t be there. Some mornings, I find my shirt torn at the collar. My pants undone. My lips parted, as if something had just whispered into them. Some mornings, my hands ache, the skin stretched too tight over the bones. My feet burn, raw and tender, as though I have been walking barefoot for miles. Some mornings, I wake with my breath held in my chest, because I know I wasn’t alone. I tell myself it’s stress—a bad habit. I was always restless as a child.

But then there are the worst mornings. The ones where I wake and realize my body feels right. The weight is gone, but something else is there. A pull. An unfolding deep within my bones. My breath is too thin, my mouth dry as though I have forgotten how to use it. My mind aches to touch something I do not have a name for. My skin is taut, like I am too large for it now, like there is something beneath it that wants out.

And then there are the dreams. The ones where I am standing at the edge of a field, watching a boy walk home at dusk. And the cruellest part—the part I cannot tell anyone, not even the man whose warmth is still pressed into my flesh—is that when I wake, I do not know if I am the one being watched. Or if I am the one doing the watching.

 ***

The stories had faded in the years I was gone. Or maybe they hadn’t faded at all. Maybe they had coiled themselves tight inside the town, whispered behind hands, tucked away in Sunday sermons and bedtime warnings. But now that I am back, I hear them again. Softened, shifting, muttered in bars and grocery aisles, in the careful way old women fold words like linens.

I am standing in line at the market, waiting to pay for a pack of cigarettes I don’t plan to smoke, when I hear them. Three women, standing near the racks of magazines and peppermint gum. They are old enough that I do not know their names, but not so old that they do not know mine. I pretend not to listen.

“You don’t go walking alone at dusk,” one of them says. Her voice is soft but final. The kind of voice that doesn’t invite argument.

The second woman chuckles, but it’s a thin sound. “Oh, come on. That’s just a story for children.”

A pause. A glance. A thread of superstition tightening between them.

“Still,” the first woman says.

And it is that word—still—that makes something behind my ribs clench.

Still.

Still, as in, even now.

Still, as in, even after all these years.

Still, as in, you know as well as I do that the stories never really go away.

The third woman exhales sharply, shaking her head. “I don’t know.” A beat. A shift. Then, lower: “Remember Muriel’s granddaughter?”

A silence between them. The first woman nods, her lips pressing into a thin line. “She saw it a few years ago.” Her voice has dropped now, lower, as though she doesn’t want the words to leave her mouth. “She was never quite right after that.”

“Poor girl,” one of them mutters. She shakes her head once, firm. “That’s why you don’t go walking alone at dusk.”

Then they see me and suddenly drop their gazes. My hands curl into my pockets, my fingers cold despite the heat outside. I could turn now. I could ask them. What do you know? What have you heard? But I do not want to hear their answer. I know it already. Instead, I step forward. The man behind the counter is waiting for me to pay. His eyes flick up, briefly meeting mine, and then away, as though something about my face makes him uneasy. I hand him the bills and leave without waiting for change.

Outside, the sun is starting to dip. The sky is bruising in violet at the edges. I was eighteen when I first left this backwater, stuffed into the back seat of a car with a suitcase that would burst open at the first hard stop. My mother had let me go with the finality of a coin tossed into a well—her lips clenched tight, a hand limp at her side as if resisting the urge to cross herself. No one came after me. No one asked me to stay.

But the story did. It grew legs in my absence. I hear it in fragments, in variations, in warnings to the soft-boned boys who walk too gently and the girls with cropped hair and their hands in each other’s back pockets.

The One Who Walks at Dusk was cast out.

The One Who Walks at Dusk was betrayed.

The One Who Walks at Dusk still lingers, waiting.

I walk down the streets of my childhood, past the school with its rusted swing set, past the church where the pastor placed a hand to my head and prayed the tenderness out of me. The houses are the same, except for the sag in their porches, the deepening cracks in their foundations. I didn’t come back for her—my mother is already in the ground. I didn’t come back for the town—I have long since accepted that some things do not ease with time. Maybe I came back because I am no longer afraid of the stories. Maybe I want to see if the people here still remember me, or if I, too, have become something whispered about in grocery aisles and on front porches. Maybe I came back because the weight of it was pressing down on my chest every night, pressing into my throat, my ribs, my groin. Maybe I came back because I knew that no matter how far I ran, my body had already begun to change.

I tell myself I should go home. But my feet are already moving toward the fields. The wind picks up as I step off the pavement. The grass moves in waves, a sea of gold and green. The last stretch of sun clawing against the horizon.

The road ends. The fields open. And then I see it—a figure at the farthest edge of the wheat, static as a cut-out in the twilight. Still tall. Still limber. Still neither a man nor a woman, neither young nor old. But closer now. Much closer. I do not stop walking. My breath thins. My skin feels strained, too tight, like I am growing too fast beneath it. My fingers curl and ache, the joints hot. The bones of my feet burn. The wind shifts. And I smell it. Wet earth. Sweat. The thick, briny scent of something alive, something that has lived too long.

And then it moves. Not a step. Not a reach. Just the slightest tilt of its head. And in that movement, I know. I know why Muriel’s granddaughter was never quite right after she saw it. I know why the cashier averted his gaze. I know why the town has been whispering about me since I returned. Because I did not leave it behind. Because it was never following me. Because I was never running.

I was changing. Becoming.

And it—this thing in the field, this thing I have feared since I was a boy, this thing I thought haunted me—was never a stranger. It was waiting. Waiting for my breath to match its breath. Waiting for my bones to lengthen, my joints to loosen, my skin to shed its last resistance. Waiting for me to come home.

Then—a sound behind me. Soft. Small. The sharp intake of breath. I turn. A boy, barely fourteen, stands on the dirt road, frozen mid-step. I see the way his fingers curl at his sides. The way his mouth parts, as if he wants to speak but cannot. The way his eyes widen with recognition. I see myself.

And when I tilt my head—just slightly—he stumbles back.

I do not reach for him. I do not need to. He will run. I will wait.

I always do.

Daryl Bruce (he/him) is a queer scholar, poet, and writer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. A recent graduate of Concordia University’s Creative Writing MA, he is currently a PhD student at Dalhousie University. His creative work has appeared in The New Quarterly, PRISM, The Antigonish Review and others.