Amabile by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Amabile

Page 2

pushing through the leaf litter, the distant tapping of a woodpecker, the faint gurgle of a stream hidden somewhere off trail. In these pauses, the forest seems to lean in, as if curious about this solitary visitor.

The path bends, and he follows it deeper into the quiet. The world of roads, shops, and mineral baths feels impossibly far away now. Here, the only movement is his own and the slow drift of shadows as the sun climbs higher. His footsteps leave a temporary record on the trail, but even those will fade by afternoon.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. The woods of Saratoga Springs have a way of absorbing silence and giving something steadier back; something like clarity, or maybe just the comfort of being small in a place that has seen centuries of footsteps come and go.

And so he continues, a lone figure moving through a landscape that asks nothing of him except presence.

He moved along the Bog Meadow Brook Trail, where the old railbed cuts a straight, quiet line through the wetlands east of town. Winter has stripped the landscape down to its bones. The cattails stand stiff and pale, their brown heads dusted with frost. The wooden boardwalk sections creak faintly under each