Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

There are any number of ways you might imagine sleep, none of them likely to be accurate. We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.

Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.