What the River Says

Between the eaves of weeping willows stood a striking estate, ransom red, revealing itself slowly and familiarly to the mail truck weaving dust along the road. The daylight was melting to dusk as wild wheat strands heaved in the wind. The truck was later than usual; different.

A clean-shaven face, striking in proportion, loomed in the driver’s window as a golden arm reached upwards to adjust the rearview mirror. He did not notice the home, a crimson shock to the serenity surrounding it, until the ramshackle panels announced themselves with a sudden shout of color as the truck drew nearer. He’d been searching the landscape for almost an hour, the secluded home his stubborn last stop. New to the route.

The state of the mailbox was not apparent until his sixth step, sighs of dead grass giving way under the sole of a thick black boot. The rusted prism was drowning, overflowing and alarmed, in unopened parchment. He gripped the two letters-to-be-delivered in hand and took inventory, finally letting the scene reveal itself in its slight disarray.

There was a rusted truck parked near a slanting shed, left of the home and ancient. A glossy convertible, still dripping condensation, rested closer to the porch. It was undeniably suspicious, but it was only his first time here—investigating surpassed occupational expectation.

He’d decided to turn back and head straight to the office when a shriek bellowed from the belly of the home, expanding, cold, and horrific. Each hair on his head shriveled away—an attempt to flee his body, undoubtedly—as devastating vignettes revolved in his mind: thieves, crimes of passion, a violent headline.

With a wet brow he debated his next move. The front door was ajar—he was noticing more of those just-off gestures, now—and a nauseating sound emanated from the second floor window.

It reminded him of something from his childhood. He couldn’t quite wrestle it to memory, but still, from somewhere in the scratched periphery of his mind, he recognized it.

If he was to investigate, which he now felt as duty, he’d have to be smart. He moved toward the home and nearly crushed each letter in cold hands now trembling. The wind picked up. After seven long breaths he finally made it to the siding. The paint was no longer a welcome red up close, morphing into a sickening crimson under the shade of a dying willow. It was leaning away from the house desperately.

The obligated postman crept on, clutching two scrunched parcels and at least five conflicting thoughts. He crept to the back door, rotted and rapping against the banister like an incessant ghost. He lifted a heavy foot into the frame, unsure amongst the damp darkness of the vaguely familiar home, and stepped inside.

The space was peculiar. Not in that there was an overturned lamp on the hardwood, or a bloodied body heaped in a corner, but just the opposite—the place was immaculate; frozen. He glanced at the kitchen counter for a sign, any sign, but found nothing remarkable. Only a solemn glass of ice water peered at him from the edge. As he paced through the house, slowly and with dread’s heavy foot thumping through his chest, he began to smell something wistful.

Decay—it had to be something from deep down, a maggoted earth; the kind of substance always coating the walls of a city sewer like festering guilt; some vegetal remnants sifting upward, odorously, from their darkened watery deaths, to thicken river arteries. There was a river nearby, he knew—the same stream slithered through the entire county. It must be some two hundred yards from him now. He glanced at the sinking landscape through murky windows and felt a tugging at his heart. The corridor gave way to a beige living room, coldly unlived-in, as a faint and insistent thumping noise fell from the stair banister just ahead.

His heart thundered at the revelation—a darkened liquid dripping down the stairs, soaking them up in a memory, seeping down to the sound of the thumping. There was a gust of wind caught in his throat now, wrestling its way around the esophagus and luring out a solitary tear. It licked down the curve of his cheek, an outward response to the constriction within.

Against all his best intentions—it was a dark pull now, a return to form—he pressed on. The first step met his foot with a shudder, and he felt the slice of a river reed against his back. He raised his other foot, trembling and damp, upward. It met the next step, and like the slick edge of a twisted bank, slipped.

He stumbled sharply left to the banister and clutched it, heaving backwards against the wallpaper and damning a frame to shatter against the unforgiving floor. He winced. The beating stopped. A sound, a horrible walloping of flesh, hurtled down the hallway and appeared at the head of the stairs in all its sublimity.

A gargantuan reptile, grey and weeping, held its jaws agape and let out the curdling sound of abrupt loss. Dark blood began to pour from its mouth and mix with the liquid coating the stairs. A demented waterfall formed, trickling close to the stunned man now frozen, and wept all the way down until it met his left heel. It was then the animal cracked its jaws and broke open down the stair like a tumbling lie, barreling towards him in muscled revelation. The beast met him with a glare, taciturn and with pity, before bursting through the front door—still ajar—and out into the waving brush.

The postman lunged to close the portal, for good, and shattered its glass. It only creaked back open, laughing. He turned and took a traumatic leap up the stairs, in a fever to make sense of the scream that led him here. He ascended the stairs, rounded the corner, and peered in the first room on the left. When he saw the figure, it all came back like a dark water drowning him.

· · ·

Sometimes a single night is strong enough to bind people together. The first Friday of August, that summer, was that kind of night—the kind of night that melts seamlessly from a bleeding sunset to buzzing darkness, a stretch of energetic hours brimming ahead with endless possibility. The boys were sixteen then, adventurous; brave enough to get into trouble and smart enough to scrape out of it. Mostly, anyway.

“What do you say we sneak into the river?” Jack Jones said, dark brown hair dancing in the wind of a racing mail bike. He slowed down as he approached the boys, lazing on the tufts of park grass, and jumped off the bike and onto Kip.

Ralph Kipner Harding, the youngest of the bunch and Jack’s closest brother outside of blood, wrestled back and drew laughter from the three other friends now poking Jack all over. They rolled over and separated, two snickering heaps, and jumped up into an embrace. “It’s been a whole week, man!” Kip exclaimed. “I thought Aunt Kelly kidnapped you!”

“I was two steps away from it, no shit,” Jack admitted. “One more forgotten chore and I woulda been banished there the rest of summer. Toast.” He emphasized “toast” by strangling himself and keeling over, joining the four boys now sitting on their haunches.

“Thank God you’re back, man, I’ve been dying for a river dip but none of these creaks had the guts to go with me,” Kip replied to the (barely) oldest, unofficial-yet-accepted leader.

“Tonight’s the night, then,” Jack stated. “We’ve only got two more weeks of autonomy. We must refuse the logic of September. We will swim. We will ride into the night on bikes—no, sails—and swim in these golden waters...for the rest of time!”

There were oohs and ahhs and maybe even some sweating. For although all the boys had wanted to swim in the river that summer, they never dared stick as much as a toe in. It was an unspoken fear, rightfully held, stemming from the shadow-stricken headlines that summer. This month, while Jack was away, there had been four missing children, last seen at the river. There were searches, investigations; signs posted up and down every street in town.

NO SWIMMING IN REED RIVER.

Jack noticed the hesitance dancing across their faces. “What’s the matter?” He asked, looking at each boy directly. Snickering: “Something bad from the plant finally leak in the river while I was away?” There was only silence. Finally, Kip answered.

“Actually, the boys are right to be slow to it. Four kids, from a year below us to two years up, went missing. All near Reed. No evidence, no links, no consistency besides one thing—that river. There’s all kinds of talk—criminals, drownings, crocs. The city even forbids it now, everyone on edge until it’s sorted out.”

This put Jack in reflection, left hand now stroking his chin. “Well, what do you say?”

· · ·

Jack stood in the doorway of his own living nightmare. Haunted by the beasts of the day and more detrimentally, devastatingly, by the mistakes of the past, he let out the deepest, longest kind of scream. Because there before him, blinking and waterlogged, was Kip Harding. The same Kip that went missing that summer night without a trace. His best friend, to this day, who grabbed hold of his ankle in the dark commotion of Reed River. The star of his nightmares, not at all delegated just for nighttime, who had fatefully trapped him here for years, in this town, always reliving his greatest mistake in the stares of the townspeople, the mothers, the mirrors.

The decaying body slumped up from its dark corner and into slanted light sifting through a mournful window. It leaked a puddle of black. “Well, what do you say?”