Song 20260703-020013
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The cartographer's third survey found the river had migrated uphill. Not flooded—*migrated*, the bed dry and cracked below, new channel carved through what had been granite ridge. She noted: "Water follows paths of least resistance. The resistance here has changed." In the settlement they no longer ask what happened. They ask what is happening now. Children born this season emerge with small calcifications at the temples, painless, the bone doctors say, and the children themselves say they help them remember things that haven't occurred yet. I am collecting these accounts before I forget why I started. I am avoiding water when I can, though driving west on the trail requires crossing such a deep pool that I barely see soil through the water and think of swimming and think of mercy. At the edge, hovering still, regret floats over my thigh.
Here is one strategy of avoidance. Normally there are droughts and droughts and not enough water. Not since the drought. This condition does not dry up water in late summer. It dries up time. In June time is variable. It skips even as we walk it. Even in well-watered areas it is growing scarce, escaping, subverting expectation.
The worst drought in five centuries. What can one say?
Not of the depletion of lakes. We could handle that, just not this soon. The obfuscation, though, of drought cycles. Of owls. The dense forested hills here, the forest that filled the valleys and registered time, displayed annually the windows of rain and light that are drought and drought and drought. How much longer would they cycle around? That now has begun to be clear.
In time it will seem reversible. But you have to be here to experience this. Someday I expect both. The stack of hidden plant DNA samples distilled here. The rain that does not fall. I have been here six weeks. Before yesterday I thought I knew three months.
After that I came back, left the well, though still looking for rain, though not finding it, my body three months older. I only thought it had been six. I carried a last sample collected years ago in a beach-side spit of sand where dune plants had reached a bottleneck, soon after the gate shut to the passage of most DNA. You forget, how and how slowly and when, the conditions and movement of pains, aches, sunsets over cloud-free skies or drizzly ones, adaptation. I take out the vial, measured in liters. The logic of accessing this sample has changed at least three times in three months. I can feel the vial, heavy/heavy, large/heavy, thick/heavy, small/heavy, cool/ soft. I set that bag on the desk, the desk in this sideways room, the room in this village that has not lifted in nearly two decades and is now too large for its geological pump, although it exists elsewhere, somewhere, somewhere else, was here◆ About the ending