The River Widow

by Ann Howard Creel

Her hands were lined and scarred and looked older than her thirty-one years. They had read cards and cooked and scrubbed and carried wood. They had turned the pages of books, touched love, and been betrayed by it. These hands now dragged her husband’s body to the river to let the flood take it away. Now they had touched death, too.

Over the course of her life, she had learned that people could hold inside the brightest peaks and the darkest pits, and there were those who straddled the break—half of them drawn to evil, half drawn to beauty. Those people could step from one side to the other and back again as if the line were as thin as a strand of hair. Her husband had been one of those people. Was she one of them, too?