On my first morning back in Morrow, I walked straight for twelve steps. On the ninth, the bakery moved.
One moment it stood between the florist and the pharmacy. The next, it was across the road, squeezed neatly between the post office and a shop that sold lamps.
A woman holding a paper bag stared at the empty space where the bakery had been.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “Another shortcut.”
I looked down at my shoes. “Did that building just move?”
“You moved it.” She pointed at my feet. “Stop doing that.”
I had forgotten how people walked in Morrow.
Children crossed the square in little lightning bolts. A man carrying two coffees took three steps right, two left, then right again without spilling a drop. Even the postman steered his cart in a gentle wobble.
When I was seven, my father used to make me do the same thing. He called it our secret dance. I called it embarrassing.
I left Morrow at seventeen. Everywhere else, roads stayed where they belonged. I decided the dance had been a joke.
Now Dad was gone, and I had come back to empty his house.
The woman with the bag was watching the bakery settle into its new position. Inside, a baker was calmly putting a tray of rolls into the window, as if his shop had always been there.
“Why did it move?” I asked.
“The town was helping you.”
“Helping me do what?”
“Get where you’re going.” She studied my face. “That’s the trouble. It gets very enthusiastic.”
She introduced herself as Mrs. Orr, from two doors down from Dad. She told me that long ago, someone had carved a promise above the old town hall: EVERY JOURNEY SHOULD BE SHORTER.
Nobody remembered who had written it. Nobody remembered when the town had started listening.
At first, Morrow shortened distances by moving a bench or joining two alleys. Then whole streets began folding together. People learned not to walk in straight lines, because a straight line gave the town a destination to work with.
“So it rearranges buildings?” I said.
“Buildings are the easy part.”
Mrs. Orr handed me a roll from her bag. It was still warm.
“Walk crooked,” she said. “And if the road gets quiet, don’t look at the end of it.”
I meant to listen. I really did.
But Dad’s house was just beyond the square. I could already see the green roof above the trees. I had a suitcase in one hand, a warm roll in the other, and absolutely no patience left for mysteries.
I stepped straight ahead.
On the third step, a lamppost slid sideways with a soft scrape.
On the fifth, the intersection ahead closed like the pages of a book. Two roads became one.
On the seventh, the wind stopped.
And on the eighth, I smelled my father’s kitchen.
Not bread or coffee. The particular smell of orange peel drying on the radiator, exactly as it had when I was a child.
I stopped chewing.
There was no longer a green roof above the trees. There was a narrow street I had never seen before, running perfectly straight between rows of houses. At its far end stood Dad’s kitchen door.
It was open.
He was sitting at the table in his blue sweater, the one with the tiny burn on the sleeve. He had his newspaper folded to the crossword, and he was tapping his pencil against a cup.
“Dad?”
He looked up.
For a second, I forgot the funeral. I forgot the boxes waiting in his hallway and the unanswered message on my phone. I took another step.
The houses pressed closer together. The road became shorter. Dad’s face grew clearer.
He smiled the way he always did when I came home too late: relieved first, annoyed second.
“You took the easy way,” he said.
I wanted to run.
Then I noticed the windows.
Every house along the street had gone dark. There were no birds, no engines, no voices. Even the roll in my hand had turned cold.
And behind Dad’s open door, where the kitchen wall should have been, there was only a depthless, starless black.
I thought about what Mrs. Orr had said: the town was helping me get where I was going.
But I wasn’t really going to Dad’s house. Not in the way that mattered.
I had come back because I wanted five more minutes with him. One more stupid joke. One more argument about the correct way to boil an egg.
The town had heard that wish.
It wasn’t bringing my father back.
It was making the distance between us shorter.
I looked at his hands, resting on the table. They were still. So was the clock on the wall behind him.
“Come on,” he said softly.
I could have reached him in six steps.
Instead, I took one step sideways.
The kitchen door shivered.
Another step, this time to the left. The street lengthened. A bird called somewhere beyond the roofs.
I turned sharply, walked toward a drainpipe, doubled back around a puddle, and made a ridiculous little triangle beside a parked bicycle.
The wind returned. The houses separated. A bakery bell rang from somewhere behind me.
I did not look at the kitchen door again.
By the time I reached Dad’s house, I had taken forty-seven crooked steps to cover a distance that should have required twelve.
Inside, his slippers were still beside the radiator. There was an orange in the fruit bowl. The kitchen clock was ticking.
I sat down at his table and, for the first time since the funeral, let myself miss him without trying to get him back.
Outside, the people of Morrow kept walking in zigzags.
I used to think they were afraid of taking the shortest route.
Now I knew they were making sure there was still a world to walk through on the way.