Is this what old feels like? Fatigue, confusion, and pain? Rose doesn’t remember feeling old. Though her memory is blasted, she is positive this rickety old carriage is not her body, not the one she’d had. This one has not been kept up, the oil not changed, the tires not checked. This one is a wreck.

Sitting on the log, everything aches. Bone grinds against bone. Flecks of black vie with leaf shadows in her peripheral vision. Should a four-week-old kitten pop out of the underbrush and pounce on her, she’d be dead meat.

Stoically, she retraces her steps. By the time Rose makes it back to the tunnel of trees leading to the sidewalk, she is drenched in sweat. Her legs are so rubbery that twice she has gone down on one knee simply because it buckled under her. Dizziness plagues her. If she doesn’t concentrate, she walks like a drunken woman.

She stops at the arch of trees and looks toward the sidewalk.

Go back, a voice she scarcely recognizes as her own murmurs in her ear. An old woman, in a costume made of her nightie, bathrobe, and bedspread, wandering around in the dead of night, looking for a sign because she believes “they” are coming for her. An old woman dies of dehydration, her emaciated body found half-chewed by raccoons.

Bon appétit, Rocky, Rose thinks, and follows the path not taken, lifting one foot, then setting it down and lifting the other. She keeps on doing that. The moon sets behind the trees. Grasses turn dark. Shrubs hunch like bears, in the corners of her eyes. The needle-beam of her light scratches lines of green in the bushes.

Cyclone fence. Picket fence. Rail fence. Nothing shakes loose in Rose’s memory. Tears are dripping off her jaw. Pitiful whimpering cries that have been irritating her for a while are coming from her own throat. She is lost to everything and everyone. Lost to herself. Deep shadows beckon, enticing her to crawl beneath the bushes and die in peace like a worn-out old cat.

A faint wisp of path, leading through the grass to her left, then disappearing into a stand of laurels, calls her name. Leaves are rose-gray in the moonlight and smell of the last breath of summer. She follows the trail through bushes edged with the strange luminescence of a city night.

The path ends at a pint-sized door with a round top and a tiny brass grate for peeking through.

Memories download into Rose’s skull with all the nuance of a dump truck pouring rocks into a hole. Not collated, alphabetized, or arranged by date, a heap of images, sounds, and emotions hits so hard, she sits down with a bone-jarring thud.

When the dust settles in her psyche, she is still looking at the gate, which seems transfixed in time by the beam of her light. Rose remembers.