Lazy clouds, loose and ragged, a drifting across blue. The sun there for moments or minutes; water flashing points of light. A flick of tiny fish between pebbles; greens in trees reflected – a willow bending to trail its leaves. Burbling and shhhh; the breeze shift through branches.
Cool, but there was still some summer in it.
There was nobody on the bridge but him. It was that time of day. Otherwise, there might occasionally have been a truck rattling and growling, but not this minute. The only noises were from birds, some calling, some quarrelling over in the trees; perhaps somewhere in the distance the chugging of a tractor. He thought he could hear a rooster. Very high, there was a small plane humming.
He leaned on the railing with his elbows, his chin in the palms of his hands. He’d draped his jacket beside him. Closed his eyes; patches of warmth and cool travelled across his face. His hair stirred, as though he was being loved and stroked. From under his eyelids, he saw light-and-red-and-dark in turn. He enjoyed it as a kind of game. When he opened his eyes he was a nearly blinded for a minute or two, the colour coming back from something greyish to greens, blues, browns, some bubbles and the pebbles far below with that flit of fish.
The sun warmed through his sleeves.
If he loosened the focus of his eyes, it would all be a blur of watery colour and light. He took off his glasses and put them in his jacket pocket.
The reaching of the willow downstream with its fingers, or sweeping like hair, perhaps.
Like hair.
He blinked, but there in the shifting shadows, sands, fronds in the shallows it did look just like hair, and a face. A pale disk, a blurred mouth and eyes, above what might have been a dress dragging like weed with the current. Perhaps a hand where a fish was nosing. Something like that painting, beautiful like a part of the river itself, flowers on dress and bank alike absorbed into each other.
The sun was covered once more with cloud. The clouds massed together, saddened into grey, a veil thickening against the sky; the breeze spat cold.
He looked away to grapple in his pocket for his glasses, squinted up and down the bank for the place. But the water had gone dark; it rushed now, or was that the effect of his glasses? There might be the brief white of a hand; that billow might be a skirt. Or weed, frankly.
To tell the truth, he could see no girl.
That night, the wind hurled rain as it hadn’t done for months. Announced the change of season. Said summer was well gone. He drew the curtains across the weather, listened to the drumming outside on the roof, to the gurgling down pipes as if the river had come to swallow the house.
There’d be no more warmth in sunny days; he already missed the colours.
He’d made himself a crumpet, with honey, sat watching a comedy and licked his fingers.
He smiled at himself. Imagine fantasising pre-Raphaelites like that. How the mind persuades itself.
He slept well, dry in his bed surrounded by a world of water, slightly sticky around the mouth, though he’d brushed his teeth.
—-o0o—-
The current tugged and tugged, swollen with the torrent from the sky, made black with night and volume, heaving and rushing. Mean now, angry, impatient to get away.
It loosened her from the bank. She’d been caught on a root, held gently all afternoon, but now rolled free. The skirt stretched out, dragged straight, pulled as the water used its strength. Her hair, earlier swirling about like the finest of vermicelli – pale, long because she’d grown it and brushed and tended it since childhood – streamed now, reaching for the folds of her skirt. For now, her feet retained their shoes, laces in a swollen knot. Black with the drenching of the water.
She turned over, hiding the white of her face in all that heaving, headlong wet. Slowly, like something in ballet, her arms swung in common accord with hair and skirt to point away from where the water was taking her. Her fingers loose, trailing, buoyed, frayed at the tips where the fish had nipped all afternoon with tiny teeth and mumbled with their thickened mouths. Her nails short, practical, cuticles neat.
She turned over again, and once more along the kilometres, caught another time against a rock and was pulled way, involved for some minutes further along in the twigs of a bough that had fallen from its dying parent. Dragged back into the race.
She spent a long night, speeding, catching, turning, a shadow in water into which the rain clattered. Sometime during the night one shoe tumbled after another, spiralling down.
In the morning she rested, shoulder halted against the hull of a boat, feet naked at last. The fish crowding around toes and fingers and nose. A small spurt of pink clouded and vanished; a fish darted, competed with another, scales winking. The dress, untethered around the shoulders where buttons had come loose, clamped heavy around her thighs.
Washed clean of the clay of her potter’s wheel – that was so very recent, she would think, if only she could – and so too of the blood from that gash in her head. That rock as weapon resting by the bank so far away, where this journey had begun.
Silent somewhere, a pot stood drying on its bench.
She lay in the shadows, at one with the shifting greens and weeds, scrubbed clean in the early morning, and another man, fishnet over his shoulder and in his mouth the first cigarette of the day, wondered if he was seeing right.
© JL Crozier