The River's Unfinished Grammar
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The boat had no name when she found it, just a number burned into the stern and a rope so stiff with salt it could stand upright. She was twelve. Her mother had been gone three weeks, her father never discussed. The man who taught her to read the river had no name either—he answered to "hey" and "you there" and once, she heard, to a word in a language that didn't exist anymore. He never touched the water himself. He only watched, and pointed, and made her swim until she could feel the temperature change three feet down. It was hard to breathe that close to the river's heart so she spent a long time with her fingers along the bottom, touching the river's belly without getting wet. Once, when she used to dream in pictures instead of words, she dreamt of the river while floating sideways on the bottom, face first. In the dream her mother could walk with her, and her father too, but in her dreams his eyes were always too big, his skin too pale, his feet too big. Alone she shivered on the bottom of the river, heart braced against the strip of sunlight, rocks cut by sunlight, everything scattered in a fan across the mud—white, red, yellow, green. Rocks that could break your heart if you knew how to touch them, she thought.
The riverboat had been underwater when she found her, as though it had settled into the dirt and refused to move again. It had made a perfect nest for swallows, and the roof of the slow, top-heavy cabin was a crumbling mass of shells and pine needles. There was one window, half-buried in green, and another in the door that looked like someone had crashed something into it with sufficient force that the wood splintered in patterned pieces. There was no latch on the window but the wood was caked with some sort of white gummy substance that held it shut. She passed under the window and touched it, feeling the texture of powdered shells as though they were figures underneath translucent skin. At first glance it was like finding a penny on the street, but when she examined it more closely she saw the dust was from life itself, white lungs. River lungs.
Ahead of her, the water loosened its knots and opened into a flat, calmer place, soft and steady as a sleeping eye, with only rocks negated by a kind of floating silence. She thought it was her favorite place. She was never really sure where it ended, in either direction, beyond stretches of water the river accepted as silence before it tightened into bright, sharp minds, but the silences on either side of the riverboat were soft. She sat in a chair with arms like legs and tipped the chair over forward, nursing the maple floor of the cabin with one hand while flipping the scarred, stained pages of a book she found propped against the door outside with the other. The pages smelled of sweet leather, the binding of osage orange, the pen ink of fish bones and river wind.
She opened to page 58 and traced the words with her fingers, as though to loosen the fading print into sight or sound. 58 was a bad page, but it was just a habit she'd learned from her grandfather and passed along to her grandmother, an old habit from a time long before her, written in words she didn't quite understand. "History is vague," her grandfather had explained to her grandmother after she took the pages out of the barn instead of burning them, "It twists with the wind. No one remembers what any of it really was, except that it wasn't now."
She grunted and let the pages drop back into order. Typically it had taken only half a stick of white pine to clean a page, but page 58 was filled with knots. She'd never been able to knead it into full readability. A shout of laughter came before her and she looked up, staring across the water at the smooth patch where it calmed, with the arm of a young girl floating in the middle of it like a belt of flowers. Poking at the soft wall of mud with a feather on the end of a stick, her hands clasped behind her back, the girl's eyes were so pale and wide and far that Vera had the strange impression that all of the trees around were floating in her brain, their leaves bright as sky, except for the one tree out of that process of color and light creation holding some piece of her heart. Everything swimming up through her ribs, out of her throat, out of the wavelets rising and flickering around the girl's arms, her legs…
The girl looked up into the sun, towards the water, and their eyes met and, like water meeting a river, burned for the second before becoming one. The water moved more and more slowly, could the girl wink? The water in front of them wavered and shifted, the moment burned: the girl shivered, the trees flowed out of their minds into the air and the others, around that girl with limbs so graceful she became a series of lines, like a staircase, and the girl, falling down the steps, tripping into her, into her own reflection that cast the same pale light of green and yellow together, brown jumping out of her own reflection, reaching out to touch it…
Vera dropped the book and jumped up, feet over the edge of the boat, the water filling her mouth, brushing her body and her mind until she fell into cool sounds, long slow breath. Her mind, halting itself in that dive, singing to her of the rocks and the trees and the girl.
"Hey." Something hit her in the chest. A head with dark curls heading into a brown line streaked with hair glued by the river. "Hi." The voice distinguished now,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title