There is a story that lives along the bends of the old creek, the one that looks shallow until you step in it and vanish to the knee. People here do not tell it outright. They gesture instead. A pause in conversation. A glance toward the waterline when the fog comes down early and wrong.

They say there was once a path that crossed the creek where the stones were set just so, like a sentence someone meant to finish later. At dusk, if you followed that line of rocks, you could hear your own name spoken softly from downstream. Not shouted. Not sung. Just stated, as if it were being checked off a list.

The elders, the quiet ones, say it was never a ghost. Ghosts want to be remembered. This thing wanted only acknowledgment. Step onto the stones, look down, and you would see the creek reflecting not the sky but another season entirely. Late summer light. Cicadas. The promise of warmth you had already used up.

One man supposedly crossed halfway and stopped. He came back older by several years, hair gone gray in a way that did not match his face. He refused to explain, only saying that the water had shown him a version of his life that kept going without him, and it seemed to be doing just fine.

These days the stones are scattered. Or maybe they only show themselves when they feel like it. The creek freezes in winter, but not all at once. There is always a moving seam, a dark V cutting through the ice, like the water is breathing under glass.

This morning there was frost on the grass and the sky had that pale, rinsed look it gets before snow that never quite arrives. I stood on the bank and listened. No voice. Just the creek doing what it does best, pretending to be ordinary.

Still, I did not step in. Some paths are not lost. They are simply waiting for the right name to be spoken back.