By Patience Mackarness
Over 170,000 people are reported missing in the United Kingdom every year.
As of March 2022 there were over 5,200 ‘longterm missing’ individuals.
Source: missingpeople.org.uk
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been here. There are no clocks, it’s on no map.
Most of those who come have stumbled across an overgrown path in high summer and followed it blind, so wrapped in their grief or confusion or guilt that they don’t care where it leads. They push through head-high bracken, snag on flowering brambles that trail across the path, bloodying hands and face. They inhale spores and pollen. Some panic and turn back. Others only stop when the undergrowth thins and they hear the sound of water. They stand still while their breathing steadies and their sweat cools, already forgetting.
What they see is a slow river, and a wooden jetty grey with weathering. A boat of the same wood, waiting on the shore. A cottage, under the eaves of a forest whose trees are the giants of an ancient tale.
And me, the ferryman, with silver hair and gypsy-dark eyes.
They don’t know their own names or why they’ve come, only that they need to cross the river. As I haul on the dripping rope, as they trail fingers in the water, as we near the other bank, they’re mostly silent. I help them ashore, show them the path to the forest, watch them follow it into the trees.
Once, a woman looked into my face and asked why I was here. I didn’t answer. I didn’t say that when I came, my hair was black and my soul troubled. That the ferryman told me he’d been waiting for me. That he brought me into his house, and into his bed. That I stayed, resting, not knowing I’d been wounded, not noticing when I started to heal.
One morning, he told me he was leaving to find his other life. He said the boat and the travellers were my task now. I took him across the river, the only person I’d ever known to go back. I watched him disappear along the green path.
My own remembering began with dreams: faces, sounds, shapes, some of them dimly familiar. I wondered for the first time where all the people went, when they passed into the forest. If there were other rivers, other paths, other doorways. I remembered, gradually, a city, a room, a small warm hand in mine. I woke to find tears on my cheeks. I understood it would soon be my time to leave.
This summer evening, a woman comes through the bracken and brambles, down to the river’s edge. She’s young but her steps are slow, as though each one gives her pain. Her eyes are ringed dark with sleeplessness. I take the boat to her, bring her across.
I say, “Come in. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Patience Mackarness (she/her) lives and writes in Brittany, France. Her work has appeared in JMWW, Lost Balloon, Lunch Ticket, Citron Review, and elsewhere.
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