Leaving home had been a longer, harder, farther journey than returning to it, he was almost certain. Walking away, he had been able to look back for days, across the fields and down from the foothills, and still see it. He had trekked and laboured, worn down his boots and spirits to leave it behind.

Yet as soon as he longed for it, as soon as he turned around, there it was. As if that decrepit husk of a town had been dragging itself after him, digging its broken fence posts like fingernails into the earth and dragging the belly of its foundations across the fallow fields. Or perhaps he had always been walking in place, unable to pull free of its grip, and every horizon he’d seemed to see that wasn’t dominated by it had only been a dream.