Dictionary of Rivers
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
The child stands at the edge where the water changes everything it touches. His mother points downstream and her mouth makes a shape like water flowing over itself: rrrrrrr-iv-er. The sound is alive in his mouth before he knows it isn't his. He tastes metal, then moss, then something that doesn't have a name yet but will remember this moment when it finally finds one. His hand, sticky with sand, reaches out to hold the word as it slips through his mother's fingers and keeps moving, always moving, like everything else he's trying to learn how to keep.
2.
In the classroom of trees, the child learns that words can be hollowed out and filled with different meanings. Teacher shows a picture of a woman with no body below her waist and calls her river, though she has no water, no movement, no end. The child draws a line across his paper that starts thick and dark then spreads into fingers that lose themselves in the white space beyond the page. This is my river, he says, touching the place where it disappears. Teacher's red pen circles the empty space and writes: incomplete. At recess, the children become rivers chasing each other across the playground, their laughter flowing over and around the children who stand still, who have learned already how to be islands.
3.
His dictionary grows like a garden planted with seeds borrowed from other people's mouths; they spr into shapes that never quite match the things he sees when he closes his eyes. River: a long narrow natural stream of water flowing to a sea, lake, or another stream. He underlines natural and writes in the margin: rain over pavement at night, tear tracks on his father's face when he thought no one was watching, the sound his sister made when she learned how to leave◆ About the ending
❧ About the title