The Bone Path
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Bone Path.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Pages lie scattered on the wet ground, lists of place-names, each one struck through, and the name of this path is among them. A man follows the track with an old map shut inside a blackened steel holder. On a wet log an open ledger sits beside a second map. The ink trace of the route on both has gone pale, the line colder than the paper. Far up the fog a single figure stands and does not come down the path toward him. Drops from the trees tick on the pages. The struck-through names darken where the water hits them and do not become readable again.
He stops at the log. The ledger's fresh line is blank. The second map's route is a ghost of a line, still the shape of a path, no longer the color of ink that could be trusted. His holder is shut. Fog moves and does not move the far figure. Minutes pass as that figure keeping one height, and as the pages at his boots taking the damp, their crossings becoming blacker while the maps lose their lines. He does not call to the figure. The figure does not lift a hand.
He matches the map in the holder to the fork at his feet. Where the lines agree, the path fades off the paper. He walks twenty paces. The figure stays the same size. He walks twenty more. The distance does not spend itself. He begins to enter the path's name on a fresh line of the ledger and stops. The lists at his boots have already crossed that name out in a hand like his own. The pen leaves a dot where he stopped and no letters after it. Fog takes the next pace of the path, not by hiding it, by making the ground there the same white as the air, a pace he has not stepped on yet.
He closes the ledger. The dot is inside, unfinished. Fog holds the far figure at one unchanging height. Inside the steel holder the map is blank where the track belongs, and the struck-through lists darken further in the damp. The name of the path, already crossed on the wet page, takes one more degree of black until the letters are only a bar under the strike. He does not peel the page up to save it. The far figure does not grow larger by his standing still.
The blank in the holder stays blank. The ledger stays shut on the dot. Fog keeps the figure at the same height, and the path's name finishes disappearing under its own strike without anyone walking it back into use.
Drops keep finding the scattered lists. Each drop blackens a strike and leaves the paper softer. The man does not gather the pages into the ledger. The holder stays shut against his coat. Twenty paces behind him, his own tracks hold, and twenty paces ahead the white of the fog does not become path again. The far figure keeps the height of a person who will not arrive by being waited for.