Home | Stories | Where Crossroads Hold Their Breath
Where Crossroads Hold Their Breath
(YouTube, Pdf can be found below.)
rom her earliest days, Nia could hear them:
the murmurs of
other lives she might have lived.
When she laughed, she could almost hear a version of herself who had stayed
silent.
When she wept, she sensed another self who had turned away and
felt nothing.
At every fork in the road, a thousand shadows arose —
not to frighten her,
but to whisper:
“What if you had turned left instead?”
“What if you had stayed?”
“What
if you had never spoken?”
Her gift was not prophecy.
It was memory unmoored —
reflections of
futures she hadn’t chosen,
but somehow still belonged to her.
She became a hunter of ephemera,
chasing wisps of paths not taken.
Her
journals filled with sketches of unlived lives.
She grew intimate with
futures —
and a stranger to the present.
One day, walking in the forest,
she came to a clearing
where the path
split into seven,
each marked by a carved stone.
Each path called Choose me! —
with a song both insistent and tender.
One path sang of love.
One of solitude.
One of security.
One of
danger.
One of happiness.
One of sorrow.
One of longing.
Nia
stood at the crossroads and wept, unable to move.
Every step forward was a betrayal of the other six.
Every chosen life
meant the death of six others.
But as she wept,
she saw someone in the distance:
a stranger cloaked in
grey, silent,
striking a path that cut through the undergrowth —
not
one of the seven carved roads.
A trail that was neither marked nor named.
The stranger did not hesitate.
Did not glance left or right.
Did not
carry a map.
Did not mourn the paths not taken.
Nia called out:
“Wait! Don’t you wonder who you could have become?”
The stranger paused. Then turned.
The face was neither old nor young.
Neither male nor female.
And the
eyes —
the eyes bore the ache of all unchosen lives…
…yet shimmered
with peace.
“I did wonder,” the stranger said.
“But then I walked anyway. And the
wondering faded.”
Nia looked down at the seven paths —
beautiful, tragic, endless.
Then she looked at the stranger’s trail:
narrow, tangled, raw.
It led not away from choice —
but through it.
She closed her eyes.
She took a breath.
And she stepped not onto a marked path —
but into the unknown,
where
the earth had no names yet.
Behind her, the murmurs quieted.
Ahead, the path opened with each footfall
—
not predicted,
not denied.
Just…
lived.
—William Zeitler
2025 June 24
You’re reading GrailHeart — devoted to what is best about being human.
⸭ Other Media
⸭ Share
⸭ Book
“Where Crossroads Hold Their Breath” is found in Stories from GrailHeart, Vol. 1, available for purchase here.