I’m old in this house the one we shared, old and baffled, liver searing on the stove, and out on the plain the smoking fog in cowlick curls can’t soothe me anymore, didn’t say where he was going or why he just, well he did just and then nothing, only the silence of broad wooden beams wet with the years, and where does a person get the will to do that? what will is that that raises a person up and sends him out like that? well the will, he always said, always beginning his sentences with well, well the will, he said, is a force whose implement is attention and whose domain is the infinity of the possible, he said, a knowable infinity like a very long menu with plenty of options, a mind and a menu, a selection must be made, but according to what principle, I would ask, yes, according to what idea I said, no idea, he said, no principle, that’s how it was between us beneath the beams of this house, before the fire in this stove and rock in this chair, rock rocking now, looking out the doorway now at the smoking plain, would like to but haven’t done in years now, smoke that is, would like to but haven’t the will to, or have the will but haven’t the attention paid to it, to that item, the smoking out there on the plain, and why did the horses never come by? why after all these years not a single horse that we saw, the reason we came all the way out here, the wild horses and the misted mornings through which their brown and blonde and grey-spotted white forms would resolve like a rasping then quickening breath, the plain so improbably green in the grey air, we used to stand and watch, sit and eat and stand and watch and he would say what are you looking at, and I would say the horses, not at but for, looking for the horses, and he would click his tongue and walk in circles with his hands behind his back, one hand holding the wrist of the other, clicking in circles and stamping his feet a little and curling his lips around his smoking pipe, because we were really here, and there was no room in the world anymore, what a concept, this was an old dream of ours, that the world was complete, that we had finally arrived and there was no more room, so what did we do? well we had to get out of the city and live the residue of that dream right out here on the plain, then one day he was gone, was outside gardening and stood suddenly erect like some insect, like a rod split the earth beneath him and ran right up through him to the slate sky above, like a human antenna attuned to something I couldn’t see from the window upstairs, where I watched him yes, couldn’t see or couldn’t attend to, lacking the will and also the sense that something was off, different or strange, let him stand like that entranced by some other frequency while I left the window and went to the other window, on the other side of the house, looking for the horses, and now thinking about this, now seeing myself seeing him then turning and pacing and seeing the spotless plain that ranged vast and far away from the other side of the house, through the other window, and I’m looking again out the first window where the garden is glimpsed and the plain after that and the extension of the bright green plain like vivid moss rolled out over the earth curved out broad like a shaved skull, and I don’t see him anywhere, not a spot nor lick of smoke anywhere, and it’s almost the new year again which makes me anxious because a new year means a new number to tell me how long it’s been, I can live within the bracket of one number without feeling the time being pulled out from under me because the number stays the same, I can will the time not to matter if you like, can live a step-wise time the downside being that the new year is like a jolt, a sudden transposition to the next step, organs bones and all moved in an instant, that’s what he’d always say, like a jolt, with untellable pain in his eyes and no will to tell me what was wrong no matter how I attended to him, just the pain and the hand upon the door frame, saying “I’m just going out to the garden,” just like that, not something to put a question to at the end of the day, and that’s the thing with the year you see the end approaching and that’s when the feeling starts and then there is the hanging over the edge of the precipice where the thing kicks, there on the edge of the precipice it bucks suddenly, the thing catches, so then the urge to leave? was that what it was? on the menu of the will is there an item for unwilling? did he will not to will anymore? and we had a matching set of black gloves and those gloves were like a hole in the world we were falling into, you’d slip them on and go out into the plain and you were gone, the gloves meant you were going, and now there’s just the one set, mine, and he’s gone, I didn’t see him take the gloves but they aren’t here, I looked and looked amid tears when he went, when he split from my time in the interval between this window and that, between my eyes here and my eyes over there and back again, must have taken the black gloves with him to the garden because there would not have been enough time to come back inside to get them in the interval between this window and the other, and since he wasn’t wearing them in the garden, they not being garden gloves but black gloves, gloves for going out into the plain, they must have been in his back pocket or tossed onto the side of the garden bed you can’t quite make out from this window, not that it isn’t in view but that it is glimpsed only at the very edge of the pane where the glass warps and curls against the frame, distorting the far edge of the garden bed the way glasses that don’t belong to you distort, and falling off the edge of your nose, so that the garden bed remains an edge without a face, and that’s what it feels like to have the edge of the garden bed in sight, an edge without a face, which is the edge of my life without him, and what I’m trying to remember is when he took the black gloves with him and where he put them on and why he went out there into the plain, no one to see him or say anything to, no one there to say do this or that, do this now and then that, to take them off, to put them on and go out there, it was his own decision, and the decision was not to will, the decision is the will to not will, and all this is the only thing I want to know, where was he going, what was he looking for, where did the idea of it come from, it hurts not to know and my heart is trying to fold in on itself, and that would be the last thing I need, my knees being already problematic, the old cancer in the pancreas waiting to come back, saw it in my dreams, seeping into the organ like rot, should never have smoked like that, oh, the last thing I need with him gone, he always looked after me and made sure I ate right and could get to the bathroom when it was difficult and put out the lights when I couldn’t stand or put them on when I wanted to read, why would he do that to me? why leave? where to with the gloves? how to become an antenna like that like an insect in the wind, wavering only slightly in the clicking carapace than vanishing, like he was zipped up in a sheath of air whose rounded sides were mirrors reflecting the plain in all directions, sheathed and spirited like he must have willed, but not me, not me helpless breathless sometimes, pain in my organs with the new year so close, pain in my heart without his voice, another year without him and without the horses, brown or beige or ash-white, like that first fire in the stove when we first moved out here, wearing our black gloves for warmth while he got the fire going and the frost crept up the glass of the windowpanes, the kindling first then a few larger twigs that were lying in the basket by the stove from the previous owners, then the first log from the pile left also, the second, and now the flame was roaring like wind and it’d be good, he said, well it’d be good to put this here cardboard in the stove because we no longer need it, yes he said, the cardboard that had had some of our things in it from the old place and now sat empty on the table by the stove, and why not, I said, thinking about the infinity of possible items that could be placed in the stove, both things there and not there, existing and not and also not yet, and but the cardboard shot up the stove pipe the moment it caught, and a moment later we heard the soft thud of burning hunks of card land upon the wood-shingled roof, and the look on his face then like a rod had split him in two, had run right through him and turned his face ash-white and made his eyes wide with fear, and he rushed out without thinking, busted the door frame leaving so hard, and then me and then the two of us out in the garden, looking up at the roof of the house framed by the black starry sky as the fiery shards plumed and curled in the air above the chimney and landed every which way, upon the roof and upon the garden and upon the plain, and how big was that box, I asked, how much cardboard could there possibly be? because for what felt like minutes it did not stop, the glowing shards spewing over the brim of the pipe, black smoke rising thick and cancerous and splitting the night with obscurity, stars flickering in and out of view behind the pasty veil, and how much more he kept asking breathlessly, passing an ungloved hand over his shaved skull, and me watching the roof, gloved hands cupped in prayer over my mouth trapping the steam of my breath, and will it? will the house catch? and then his gasp as for an instant it did, a great mane of fire leaping half a foot high into the sharp night along the spine of the roof, and oh no, he said, and my eyes covered black now with gloves, and minutes went by it felt like before he sighed differently, in relief, and looking I saw the roof dark again and serene with the frost that saved us, steaming like a roasted animal in the night, and all of a sudden it began to snow bitterly, as if a celebration elsewhere had slipped into our corner of the world, and hail and snow in cycles, pounding and pillowing across the blackened plain, and we stood there freezing for a long while watching this unfathomable storm of ice from above, and I saw the house like a crystal palace set upon an hibernal cliff in a faraway place, all the windows a living dream of glitter and sheets of ice, the snow and frost like a wave of wrinkles on the glass, the outer wall like a death mask of the attic, the sagging space beneath the roof now an iced cavern mouth, dark, secret, smelling of memory and chill-thinned air, and it was then that I said to him in a whisper, “There is no such place as a plain,” but he was already up the ladder from the storage shed beside the house, already up on the roof, pulling down the broken-beyond-repair shingles, silently working and muttering, “I know I know,” and when the roof was clear of shards he went back inside and began stacking the stove again, lightly, and spreading some kindling over the coals and the flames and sent up a column of thick smoke, filling the world with a cloud of what must have been, what indeed was white and pasty as if rolled between the fingertips, and couldn’t he have thought of that night before he left? or did he? was that what made you go like that in the interval between the windows? sometimes I see bits of white and grey on the horizon, too far to make out, the white lying on the lawn and the grey lengthened to the edge where the curvature starts, where he might yet be, and from time to time I see what looks like a horse just there, just over the rim, tempting the horizon and my will to follow, to leave this plain for the next, for he will not come back, not here, and the horses never shall arrive, and there is no such place, really, as this.

Ben Libman has published fiction in The London Magazine, 3:AM, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Third Solitude, forthcoming with Dundurn Press in 2025. Twitter: @benlibman