The Best of the Brine

A Gravel Road



The gravel crunched beneath our feet, each sound sending tiny explosions up my shins and into my thighs. It made me feel alive, but at the same time, it frightened the hell out of me. We had to be quiet, but the ground full of white and grey rock made that impossible. I couldn’t see the end, it simply stretched out before us like a snake with no head.

And we couldn’t turn around. No, we couldn’t do that.

A rustling of the leaves created by a thin cold wind made me misstep. I fell forward into the gravel road, catching myself with my hands. The pain of the small rocks digging into my palms was immediate and gut-wrenching. When I sat up on my knees and turned my shaking hands over to inspect the damage, it occurred to me that I could have just killed us both.

Little red splattered rocks were stuck in my skin, like a mosaic of blood and stone. Blood dripped from my palms to the ground, staining the rock below. My eyes hesitantly travelled upwards until they met with Jon’s.

His face was twisted into an expression I had seen only once before. My heart dropped and I mouthed the words, I’m sorry. In some small way, I was relieved. Because our endless journey down the gravel road would be over soon. But perhaps not soon enough.




Jon slowly bent his knees until he was eye level with me. The denim of his pants and the leather of his jacket creaked with protest as he outstretched his hands for mine. His eyes softened when he took my fingers between his and brought them to his mouth.

With quiet grace, he kissed each finger. He was telling me something. I wanted to say it back. But I was entranced as I watched him remove each piece of the gravel road from my hands. He took such care to make sure that each piece was gone. It hurt, but I knew that pain was only temporary in this world.

When he was done, and the bloody rocks were strewn around us, I wanted to cry out. The words were dancing in my mouth, pounding against my teeth and my lips and my jaws. My head throbbed with the effort of keeping all I wanted to say within myself.

But we stood and kept moving. If Jon had been the person I had met a year ago, he would have left me when I fell. Some small part of me wished he was still that person. Because then at least he would have lived, even if I wouldn’t have. We crunched the gravel together, as loudly as we pleased.

Jon’s hand found my wrist and he gripped tightly, which I did not mind. I wanted to feel him now, more than I ever had. How could I have been so stupid, so clumsy?

But then we saw it. The end of the gravel road. It was perfect and concluding, just as an ending to something so big should have been. In my dreams, I had only imagined it. I looked at Jon, and a smile threatened at the edge of his mouth. We were saved.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. Something wrong. And the world crashed down on me. My heart pounded against my ribcage. My pulse quickened to an unfathomable pace, as if it was racing something with greater speed than itself. I released Jon’s hand, because it wasn’t him that was with me.

A now distant memory flickered at the corners of my mind, illuminating only small portions of a vast source of knowledge. With each moment, the light grew dimmer, and my memories became darker, less clear.

In the second before I lost myself, I threw everything into one last attempt and being human.

I pried my eyes open, because I knew they hadn’t been before. I needed to know if Jon’s kisses had been true. If they had been real, and good, and everything we were.

It hurt to open my eyes, more than I thought anything could. I saw the remnants of the sky, and then Jon’s face. His eyes were closed as we lay in the gravel road, his hand still on my wrist. Blood stained rocks dotted the ground around us. My lip trembled.

So there was no end to the gravel road. We had been caught and plugged in before we even knew what had happened. It was all so seamless. I wondered if Jon knew.

A red blinking light appeared over me, hovering only inches from my face. I squeezed Jon’s hand for any kind of courage he had left. As tears rolled down my face, I pleaded with the thing that now controlled my destiny.

“Please, keep us together. I love him,” I said through a breaking heart.

It blinked.

I closed my eyes, but wondered why. When I opened them again, I realized that I had fallen asleep. My husband leaned over to me, a mischievous smile highlighting his beautiful mouth. “Where did you go just then?”

I blinked. “I don’t know, Jon. I can’t remember.”


He placed his hand over mine, tenderly tracing my fingers with his own. “Sometimes I worry about you, sweetheart.”

Something itched at the back of my mind, as if I was supposed to remember something important. “Sometimes I worry too.”

He frowned as he held my palm closer to his face. “Did you fall?”

I looked down, seeing small scratches in my skin. It was almost as if I had fallen into gravel. But that was impossible. I smirked, and he knew I was about to say something very cheesy. “Only for you.”

As I stared into the red digital clock later that evening when Jon slept, I felt as if I could have cried. For some reason that I would never be able to comprehend I said, “Thank you.”