Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

The Swan at Radcot had its own specialty. It was where you went for storytelling.

is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.

raising the dead was a not infrequent thing at the Swan, and that’s a detail worth remembering.

river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

these happy memories were the type that only sharpened the hardship of her existence since. She could not think of those golden days without despair, and came close to wishing she had never lived them. That hopeless longing for lost happiness in the eye of the pig must be how she herself looked when she remembered the past.

child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.”

if you remember that every one of us spent the first nine months of our existence suspended in a sac filled with liquid, perhaps that makes it a little less incredible. Remember next that our land-going, oxygen-breathing selves derive from underwater life—that we once lived in water as we now live in air. Think of that, and doesn’t the impossible start to edge closer to the conceivable?”

Daunt had to acknowledge that the river was too vast a thing to be contained in any book. Majestic, powerful, unknowable, it lends itself tolerantly to the doings of men until it doesn’t, and then anything can happen. One day the river helpfully turns a wheel to grind your barley, the next it drowns your crop. He watched the water slide tantalizingly past the boat, seeming in its flashes of reflected light to contain fragments of the past and of the future.