First, you want us to find the old cemetery, and you remember, from nowhere, the name: Upson Road, near the place where that pretty young high school couple wrecked their cars one night, crossing double yellows and becoming the trailing-off silence at the end of stories.

We follow rural highway markers to where Route 4 curves and your car remembers, or your hands remember the place where asphalt gives way to the potholes and cornfields and dust mote miles I thought only lived in my dreams. At the end of the road, Green Lady Cemetery, or the place where we went to bob flashlights through the woods and scare the piss out of our friends. The three ancient headstones that still stand are barely legible. You are brow-furrowed and quiet, and then I wonder aloud if 1763 was real to us when we were young and committing sacrilege through their burial ground. I wonder aloud about the plight of these families, if our circumspect visit seven years later in late November sunshine is penance enough.

Under the bridge in Collinsville, or the place where I had once as a child cast fishing lines in the night with my father, and waited in companionable silence. Later, this would be the place you and I would burrow like snails in the river bank and trade softness. Now we pace nervous circles around each other, talk deadbeat dads, and I’m thinking about the places in the brush-tangle shore where we might still find the imprints of two people against the dirt. I don’t remember when it was that we told each other, our common thread. I remember telling my mom, though, and I remember how she cried, how she would still make you go home at night when you would fall asleep on my couch.

Finally, standing ten feet fall in Tunxis, our final stop, the place where I can conjure every person I have ever been here. And you are six feet tall and the exact kind of handsome you were as a kid, with your squinting eyes, your whole body braced against the cold—You try, too, and so we both close our eyes, beat at the fields yellowing under our feet, summon the people we mourn. I am summoning: Age 10. My orange-slice mouth in a frantic minnow sea of soccer jerseys. Age 15. My pale glowing blur in motion, streaking from the water, slick with river muck and the stuff that comes from inside of me, where I am a knot of impulse I don’t yet understand.

To go home is to be brought to your knees, after all. We are wind-whipped and raw when we finally leave, and the field is still empty, save for our long shadows lengthening.

Hannah Carpino is a short story writer and poet living in Vermont. Her work has previously been featured in Rust + Moth and the Rappahannock Review.