Ancilla L
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The River.
🕑 Added 2023-09-25 07:50:27 +0000 UTCAs he holds my head under the water, I grasp at the riverbed for support. The soil is loose, the more I scratch, the more gravel I unearth. The water shoots up my nose and inside my mouth, I shake my head in an attempt to surface but neither does he relent, nor does the river. It's not quite the same to be drowned in a river, as it is in a tub of water, it feels like waterboarding more than anything else. Even if I make no attempt to breathe, even if I create a pressure barrier to hold my nose shut, the water gushes into my body, but I am not as panicked as I would have been if this had been a tub of water. It's hard for me to fear the water of these streams, they feel too much like home to cast the terror of the unknown. My grandfather used to say that it's not the water that you need to fear when you step inside these streams, it's the stones that will kill you. He's not wrong.
There are enormous boulders and rocks along the path of every river. When I was little, I couldn't imagine that the world contained anything bigger or more substantial than those stones. They are large grey masses, precariously but firmly balanced. Some of them flaunt substantial cracks and chips, but like old men whose substance reflects so unmistakably like fire through their eyes, even the damage to their structures doesn't make them appear frail, instead the cracks bear the quality of scars on the faces of warriors. Their edges are smooth and their shapes pay no homage to the symmetrical stylings of human aestheticism, they're worn down over centuries, not by the cruel vicissitudes of sudden acts of destruction, but by the unrelentingly gentle force of the water. As a child, I couldn't fathom anything more substantial than climbing to the tops of the largest rocks, it didn't seem like the world had more height to offer than that. I was scared of them too, scared of slipping down dozens of feet over smooth surfaces and into the ravine, scared of burning my knees and palms as I climbed, scared of falling against them and cracking a tooth. My fears are different now.
As he pulls me out of the water, at last, I lean against the large rock behind me to get my bearings. He slaps my mouth with the back of his hand and I push my hands deeper into the riverbed. In his hand, he holds a sharp flat stone not bigger than a coin. It's brown, but not like the earth, it's brown like a melted crayon. He holds the edge of the stone against my mouth and pushes against the soft tissue. It doesn't quite cut my skin, but it makes the blood rush and swell. He holds the stone to my lips with his fist and pushes until it feels like my teeth are cutting my lip from the inside and the brown edge from the outside, as if they're trying to meet and are being held apart by the inconvenience of my mortal flesh. The stone is so smooth, I am tempted to put my tongue against it, it feels like glass. Water really is the most superior tool of lapidary. As he dunks my head back into the water, he lets the brown stone fall inside beside me, it passes through my fingers but there is so little friction and so much force of the water, that I cannot catch it. I will never see it again. What was once so large, it was perhaps visible from the treetops so far away, now slips through my fingers into individual anonymity with such ease, as if it was destined to be unknown.
This time he pushes me so deep my face is against the riverbed, as I shake it around, unable to commit to the serenity of surrender, the gravel cuts against my face. I open my mouth to scream, because fear does not understand reason. It does not understand skill. It obeys no master, but nature itself, I cannot override fear, it overrides me. As he pulls me out again, my hands and face are coated with little specks of gravel. I study my hands to find hundreds of little stones, no larger than morsels of sand, buried inside my nail beds. As I attempt to pull them onto my palm, I notice the little cuts and scratches my hands bear. I ignore the burning, for now, and bring my hands so close to my eyes, the rest of the world ceases to exist. The stones are so small, so miniscule I cannot pick one up individually without a fine tweezer but I can see that they carry the unmistakable markings of the boulders I so greatly feared as a little girl. I can see that they were once gargantuan, thousands of years ago, they towered over the trees and held down the barriers of whatever civilisation once resided here. They were once climbed on by children, warned against by grandfathers, they once burned the hooves of a goat, they once served as the surface off which some creature slid to its death, and now I hold them by the hundreds in my palm. They were once the largest, most fearful structures one could fathom, and not they flow out of my hand into the river, destined to erode into a nothingness that is indistinguishable from the nothingness of another.
I have new fears now.
He pulls me up by the arm and sits me atop a large rock, my feet still dangle into the water. I put my palms against the stone, it's a scorcher of a day and I can feel my hands turning red in response to the heat, the cuts and scratches on my hands burn like acid. The sun shines through my eyelashes and makes the water sparkle, in a few hours, it will rain. I stare at the large rocks that surround me, they don't seem terrifying anymore, they seem dependable, strong and bigger than life. Their forefathers little my clothes and skin like offal, I wash them off into water without a thought. They seem terrifying now, destined to be forgotten, their greatness eroded and neutralised. Their identity merged with millions of their kind to form the bedrock of a river with no name. I have new fears now. It's all for the best. My fears are as meaningless now as they were when I was little. It was my own error to look for meaning where I found fear. The meaning does not lay in the rocks. It's in the water. This river may not have a name, but it doesn't need one, it has shaped a million boulders bigger than life itself and gently delivered them from the hubris of renown and the banality of greatness to the wonder of erosion and the peace of nothingness. There is no meaning in my fear of the rocks.
The river that drowns me gives me meaning. It chisels me from grandeur to nothingness. I call it by his name.
