"I Know the Way Home" by Natalia Kostylev

       He could see the road clearly now, the well-trod path home. He'd walked it several times, but never enough and never in the right direction. He was always leaving, and it seemed as though he never really returned home. The work was never done... the world was never at rest... and someone always needed him, sooner or later.
       As his soft gray eyes took in the familiar sight of cherry blossoms and weeping willows, his thoughts drifted slowly to the family waiting for him at home. Trinkets lined his pockets, waiting to be placed into his daughter's eager hands; she was almost six now, he mused, and felt a stab of guilt for his absence. She was three the last time he set eyes upon her face, and as he left he feverishly counted the hours of their parting in his sleep, spoke prayers into the nighttime winds for her.
       Reaching into his pocket, he dug through the trinkets there until he found what he was looking for and closed his fingers tightly around it. One trinket he could never bear to part with... his wedding band. His steady footsteps became automatic as his mind raced back to their last night together; her feverish whispers of love and the hot tears that stung his eyes and seared their way along his face as she took her last breath, the quiet grief that welled in him then like a flooding river, the helplessness of a hero unable to rescue his most precious belonging. He recalled spending his last night at home at her grave, sleeping fitfully and calling her name in sorrow long into the dawn.
       He'd left all of it there at her grave to do his duty, but his sadness whispered to him in the silent hours of sleep no matter how far he went. It spoke in great detail of things he'd rather forget, and it spoke in his wife's dying voice. Now he would come home forever, he decided after many tearful nights. Lay down his sword and raise his daughter like a normal father should. The world would do without him well enough, as it had before he came along.
       It was then that the road beneath his feet began to fork and, startled from his thoughts, he shifted his gaze from one path to the next. The left, he knew with intense familiarity... the left would take him home. And to the left he changed his course, but took few steps before he heard a soft, familiar cry upon the wind. It resounded in his heart.

Not yet...

       There was a long, uncertain pause as his mind argued the wind playing tricks on a tired hero's ears and his heart argued a wife's undying loyalty to stay with him beyond her death. His haggard, dusty figure stood unmoving for what seemed like hours and then, slowly, he shifted to the right.
       With tear-filled eyes he turned his gaze from home and onward to the path he did not know, and when he pulled his hand from his pocket at last, a golden band shone around it once more. He did cry then, and gave one longing glance towards the other path before continuing along his way.
       This was, he reasoned, just the long way home. A very long and lonely way. But he was not alone.