Tomorrow

There is only one road to and from the village. It is an unremarkable thing, beaten out of dirt and flanked by tall hedges that stop it from encroaching on the neighbouring farmlands. Robin could tell Lucien that it has been around since ancient times, if he'd bother to ask. But Lucien never does. He doesn't care about the road's past, only wants to know where it leads.

The road stretches as far as the eye can see, which, in the dimly lit bowers of the willows that rain over it, isn't very far at all. It's just about wide enough for the most modest of cars, driven by the occasional lost tourist aiming for the nearby town. No one's really looking for Lucien's village when they find it.

There's no inn for strangers to put up for the night, and no reason for them to want to stay beyond a quick meal at the riverside pub and a plea for directions. The village has almost no mobile reception and only very recently learnt about Wi-Fi. It has one butchery, one bakery, one thrift shop, one school, and a smattering of little thatch-roofed cottages. Once a day, the milkman drops off fresh milk on each doorstep. The nearest post is a forty-minute walk away, but Lucien has never been there. The church stands in the centre, just in front of the village green, where it presides over colourful fetes. Every five in the evening, the shadow of its crucifix hangs over a well that no one has used after plumbing was installed a couple of decades ago.

Nothing ever happens here.

There is only one road to and from the village. Every day, Lucien stops by it on the way to class and squints into the cool shade until the path seems to twist and turn and converge in on itself. Every day, he tries to see a little further.

And he'll tell himself, tomorrow.

But nothing ever happens here.

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The village is old.

No one young ever stays and there aren't all that many kids to start with. It's less of a blood pact and more of an unspoken promise, but every summer, after senior high exams are completed in the sweltering heat of the stuffy old classrooms, the village will lose one or two more able-bodied youths to the bright lights of the city.

There were no clouds in the sky on the day Lucien's brother set off, with nothing but the knapsack on his back and the grin on his face. Avery left behind promises to call, promises to visit, promises to take Lucien along one day. A whole slew of promises that they both knew he'd never keep, because Avery is Avery and Avery is made up of snips, and snails, and puppy-dog tails. Avery is a boy, through and through, and boys love adventure. Lucien is a boy too, and if he'd been the one out there having a whale of a time, he probably wouldn't remember to come back either.

Tomorrow.

The sun was blinding on the day Avery left. Lucien blinked away the sweat that dripped into his eyes and missed the moment Avery vanished from his sight. It was like his brother had been swallowed whole by the road.

Avery wasn't the first to leave him that way.

He wouldn't be the last to either.

"Don't know where we're going to go, but I'm shaking this limpet off first chance I get."

"Stop making it sound like I'm dying to travel with your lonely perverted teenage brain. It's not like I begged to be born in the same year as you."

"Oi—"

Lucien's sixteen when Kay and Sage pack up and go. He doesn't know what he'll miss more, hunting in the forest with Kay, the butcher's daughter, who always knows where their prey is hiding, or eating whatever Sage, the baker's son, whips up with their trophies. He figures that he'll miss them both, just as much, which is why he hauls himself out of bed at four in the morning, just as sunrise peeks over the horizon, to walk them over to the road.

The grass beneath their feet is showered in dew. Lucien stands there and lets it soak into the hem of his jeans when they pull him into a hug. One, then the other. And when they look at him, it's with an undercurrent of expectancy, humming against his skin. He knows, then and there, that they'd stay if he asks. Because they crowned him king of the kids when he was a little boy and nothing between them has changed even after ten years.

But dreams aren't made to be tucked away in a sleepy pocket of the countryside. Sage can't become a world-renowned chef without stepping foot into the outside world. Kay is sick of crafting arrowheads from flint she picks up from the dirt. They've got answers waiting for them out there.

So Lucien pats them on the back and sends them on their way with a magnanimous smile, until their bickering fades into the blue shadows and all that's left to keep Lucien company is birdsong.

Tomorrow, he reminds himself, when his lips wobble and his fists clench so tightly he'll have crescents marked into his skin for hours.

Tomorrow.

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Charlotte calls him once from the city. The landline's attached to the wall of the cramped kitchenette. Lucien has no choice but to flatten himself against the ugly yellow wallpaper and chat while Aunt Daisy bustles around complaining about young love getting in the way of her potato stew. It's not love, Lucien thinks, that makes him grip onto the phone harder, press his ear more tightly against the receiver so that he doesn't miss a thing. Charlotte's his best friend, sort of, but it's not her that he craves to reach through the tinny connection.

"Lucien?" she says, voice smaller than he can recall it ever being. "Is that you?"

"Lottie! How's things going?"

"I miss everyone. I miss you."

"I miss you too."

There are a thousand noises in her background. The screech of wheels and the blare of horns. The constant thrum of low-key conversation, too faint for him to decipher. It sounds dehumanised. Like Charlotte's surrounded by the robots Lucien saw on yesterday's afternoon's sci-fi special. She doesn't want to talk about her new job or her new apartment. Lucien doesn't know why she's calling if it's not to update him about her life, but he needs to fish around for something to say. So he asks the question they both know he's going to ask anyway.

"What's the city like?"

There's an audible shudder in her reply. "Oh god," she gulps. "Lucien, listen to me. I know you want out of there but don't...just don't come here. You'll hate it. It's like, the place where living things go to die. An abattoir for souls." She goes on to describe a concrete jungle, a world tinted in greyscale, and how that's not even the worst of it, that there is still a real ugliness to be found in people.

It's no wonder that she's wilting. Charlotte's made for prettiness. Midnight walks in the everlasting drizzle and the wind singing in her hair. It's too bad that she wants more than the village could offer. She wants the fashion, the glamour. To trend on social media as she navigates her way to stardom. Lucien's not going to be the one to tell her no.

"When you're done dreaming," he says, "come home."

"…will you be there?"

"Hm. Guess so." After thousands upon thousands of tomorrows, there's nowhere else for him to be.