Go as a River

by Shelley Read

Imagine what lingers on the black bottom of a lake. Debris, rivered in or tossed from boats, grows shaggy and soft. Pouty fish swim their strange lives, far from the hook, in inseparable breath and motion.

knew the town of Iola when it woke each morning to fragrant breakfasts and bustling farms and ranches, how the sunrise illuminated the east side of Main then inched uptown, across the train tracks and schoolyard, to ignite the tiny church’s one round red-and-blue stained-glass window.

I’ll never know how much of my and Cal’s consistent obedience to Mother’s expectation came from our own virtuousness or from wanting to counterbalance the trials Seth caused,

God will pluck your mother, your cousin, your aunt from this earth like peaches pulled from the branch too soon.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

The storm started as a rush of wind through the highest pines. The treetops began to sway like drunken giants before I even felt a breeze. The songbirds hushed, issuing a warning I didn’t understand.

As I passed Ruby-Alice’s property, I recalled the solace of that little house among the pines, where I first felt Wil’s embrace, where Ruby-Alice cared for me after I emerged from the Big Blue. A twinge of wistfulness tugged at me for all I’d leave behind, for the unsuspecting landscape carrying on as it always had but doomed to be drowned. But, as I approached town, I thought of how this place also held the cruelty of ignorance, where some folks believed a lonely old woman was a devil and a beautiful tan-skinned boy was an outlaw and a skunk.

sat down in the cool darkness cast by the pines. Reaching to my sides, I scooped two handfuls: black dirt, pine needles, pebbles, twigs, leaves, one tiny snail shell, one white downy feather. I looked around me at the birth and growth and death piled atop one another, at the open bellies of downed trees feeding new sprouts, all the life pushing through every crook and crevice and possibility for light.