The Road That Wanted to Go Home

How it begins

Faye Bristle could not deliver the morning letters because the road had curled up beneath a bridge. It lay in a long gray coil with its signposts tucked under one bend.

'Good morning,' she said.

The road did not answer. A milestone slid a little farther into the coil.

Faye was a fox mail carrier. She knew every lane, every shortcut and which garden gates needed lifting before they would open. She had never known a road to refuse to go somewhere.

Hugo Penn arrived carrying a box of repaired shoes. He stopped beside the bridge.

'Has it got a stone in it?'

'It is mostly stones.'

'Quite a lot to check, then.'

He sat at the edge and removed his own boots. Cobblers knew that feet sometimes complained about things they had been carrying for too long. Perhaps roads were similar.

At last, from beneath the bridge came a voice like wheels on damp gravel.

'I want to go home.'

Faye looked along the empty space where the lane should have been. 'Where is home for a road?'

'I don't remember.'

The first letter in her bag was addressed to a cottage at the far end of the valley. The last belonged to a badger who had moved away and still wrote back every month. Faye had spent her life helping things reach the places they belonged. She had not considered the path between them might need somewhere too.

Hugo took a small brush from his shoe box and swept mud from the road's oldest stone. Beneath it lay a print, faint and narrow, made by the first feet that had ever crossed.

The road loosened one bend.

'I remember a door,' it whispered. 'And someone waiting.'

Faye closed her mailbag.

'Then today,' she said, 'the letters can travel with us.'

Hugo put on his boots. Under the bridge, the road began remembering which way its beginning lay.