River Sing Me Home

by Eleanor Shearer

You don’t need to know. You feel it.” “What?” “The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.”

“I do not mind feeling small. I do not need reminding that I am Nobody—as are we all.”

(Orion’s tears were flowing again like rivulets. They fell down familiar paths, threatening to erode gullies in his cheeks, for he had wept these same tears before, and would weep them again and again until the end of his life.)

But to feel alone, as those men had done? To discount all the other life around her, to discount even the gently flowing water and the fertile earth itself as companions in her journey? That struck her as the height of arrogance.

No trees had been cleared to plant crops—even cultivation would have seemed too much like daring the fragile freedom, finally won, to shatter before their eyes.