The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

the leaves for tea, the bark for medicines and baskets and cordage, the wood for furniture and instruments.

Esther took to foraging while Ysabel preferred gardening;

Do you love murder ballads because you want to be murdered?

Rin was a feeling, a lightness in her step, a burr in her throat; some days she thought she’d made them up inside her head, so difficult was it to put words to them.

Everything was riddles with Rin, and as much as Esther loved riddles, her chief pleasure was in solving them. Pollard was a loose thread begging to be pulled; Rin was a knot that would not come undone.

There are lands that are near to us geographically but far from us temporally: London is not Londinium, though it’s built from its bones. There are lands that are near to us temporally but far from us geographically: we can be certain that at this moment, in Italy, someone is sitting down to their breakfast with a newspaper dated roughly the same as ours, though we cannot expect to reach them in time to join them for the meal.

“With the past, or with the future. We think of the cherry or the chicken as unchangeable things, and the song pokes at those assumptions. How is a cherry not a cherry? Well, when it’s a flower. How is a chicken not a chicken? Well, when it’s an egg. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry. All right?”

“Every conjugation is also a translation,” she recited dutifully. “But not every translation conjugates. Transformation implies movement, but things can move without being transformed.”

“Indeed. The Liss saved her life with a pun.” Agnes looked at the swan thoughtfully. “Or a kind of riddle, I suppose. When is a signet not a signet? When it’s a swan.”