The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

Her smile, which was practiced over the years, its mettle tested in a variety of difficult situations that would have meant the end of her life had she not been able to beam through them, collapsed a little. Some unattended infrastructure of the heart, a hairline fracture in the supports, threatening to buckle under the weight of her second’s sudden moment of generosity. A brief hesitation that rent Raami’s heart.

You can fault the dancer, but more often than not, it is the dance itself that has to change.

But you know as well as any guilty party that no one thought stands alone. That there is a city within you, populated by both high- and lowborn beliefs, interjections, prayers, rantings.

That like the spear’s journey through time, much of this dance is dictated by chance. You are merely, crucially, no one but yourself, as anyone else is themselves—mere stewards, gifting recursively over the divide of time this spear, that memory, to the people and the place from which they had come—and who, in turn, gift back to you your strange, and sad, and wide-eyed futures.