Go as a River

by Shelley Read

I kissed her forehead and felt glad for her life—so odd and singular, so strangely overlapped with my own—and glad for her death, the only one I had ever known to be correct. “Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.

I’m just saying the government can do anything it damn well pleases, and people suffer,” she said. “And we don’t learn one scrap from history.”

Women endure. That’s what we do.” “That’s nonsense,” she replied more harshly than I expected. “A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”