Go as a River

by Shelley Read

Wil turned without looking at me and strolled steadily through the yellow field back toward town. The lavender horizon seemed to sip at him until his form grew minute and disappeared. I wondered if he was heading back to the rails. If one place was as good as another to him, a different place on the line might now do him better than the town where Seth lived. It never occurred to me that he was pondering the opposite as he grew tiny in the distance, that Iola had become for him a place above all others, a place not to flee because of Seth but to remain because of me. “The whole time I was walking away,” he later told me, as we lay tucked together in the blankets of his bed, “I was figuring out how to get back to you.”