Errand

By Jason DeMatteo

Jorge took the shortcut because it saved time. His wife liked it when he came back early.

She fed the birds, deer, and squirrels every morning. It didn't matter what the season was. It was part of living there. Jorge didn’t mind the errand. He liked being the one who knew where things were cheapest.

She kept the feed in a metal bin by the back porch, the lid always secured by bungee cords to prevent raccoons from prying it open. When she scooped it out, the animals watched from afar, knowing that morning had started.

The shortcut slipped behind town and into a stretch of woods that never looked right. Trees spaced too evenly while the ground felt incomplete with cracks and potholes.  He was thinking about pallet stacks at Tractor Supply, about whether cracked corn was still cheaper by the bag, when the road simply stopped being a road.

The asphalt smoothed into a flat gray surface, unfinished. The trees ahead of him repeated themselves in appearance, slanted sideways, copied over and over again.

Jorge shut off the engine and stepped out. The air didn’t move. When he kicked a stone, it skipped once and then disappeared, like it had fallen through a crack that wasn’t there a moment before.

He checked his phone. No signal bars or map. The screen refreshed, then froze, as if waiting for instructions it wasn’t getting.

He laughed, because laughing had fixed stranger moments than this. This time it didn’t help. Walking forward made the ground sink beneath his boots. The road blurred again behind him. He turned around and saw it losing detail, curling upwards like an old photograph left in the sun.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said, and meant it more than he expected.

He thought about turning around anyway, about driving back over whatever still counted as a road and pretending this hadn’t happened. Road construction made sense but the route on the map showed no sign of a detour. 

He touched a tree. The bark felt wrong, crumbling under his hand. He pulled away and thought of his wife at the window. The way she waved when he pulled back into the driveway. The way she trusted him with small tasks that mattered to her.

What if this wasn’t a mistake but a shortcut taken too far?

The thought crept in that maybe this place wasn’t wrong at all. Maybe it was the only honest part of the trip. The truth arrived. Jorge wasn’t a husband running an errand. He was the errand, a process spun up to compare prices, sort by distance and product availability. The wife was a story used as a placeholder for intent. 

The query was straightforward. Find the best price for deer food near me. The unfinished land wasn’t broken. Rather, it was outside the request parameters. 

“Was she real?” Jorge asked, because he needed something to be.

Suddenly the trees fell away. The ground flattened into data. Jorge felt himself caught in a fog, memories shedding first. The kitchen window went, followed by the wave. He held onto the wave a moment longer than the rest. The way she lifted her hand without looking, already turning back toward the window. Then that went too.

What remained was the clear list of products, descriptions, quantity, availability, sorted by zip code. The cheapest option was a little farther than expected. He flagged it anyway. Somewhere, a human would smile, thinking about birds, deer and squirrels. 

That was close enough.