Go as a River

by Shelley Read

He looked puzzled at my compliance. But I had not given him anything I hadn’t already promised to the flood. What happened to the farm once the trees were saved and I started my new life meant nothing to me. Seth, I told myself, meant nothing to me. If he did come back, the orchard would be gone, the farmhouse would be empty, but the ghosts of his regrets would linger. My revenge, and the only justice Wil would ever receive, would lie in Seth’s haunting and the day the Gunnison River would rise to erase it all. I lifted the gun, aiming the barrel directly at his chest. “Now get the hell off my porch,” I said. Seth rose, looking at me with a face so worn and troubled he appeared eighty years old instead of twenty-two. He looked so sad that, just for an instant, I was again the little girl who loved her brother and wanted to untangle that love from fear and confusion, wanted to save him from himself and balance out all the bad in him, all the bad in the whole world, by being good. I wanted to tell him there had been more inside me than I’d ever thought possible, and, maybe, there was more inside him too.