The Story Garden 5.0
Flash Fiction
A History of Water
I think of the Mississippi all the time. Always, I remember it when I least want to: the conversation of barges and Soviet freighters, egrets and seagulls.
It’s a form of faith when we don’t believe in faith, but trust ourselves to swim the breadth of the river, if we had to. It’s Mass for the Unfaithful by brown waves and flotsam passing jetsam.
I trust the half-moon in the morning, over river's elbow and knees due east; and trust this river helps hold the World in place.
“I’m a deep thinker,” you brag. We kick bleached shells that top the levee like a zipper down the ragged center of the states.
I watch a fish carcass make half-time for the Gulf and plan on this memory meaning more than it does-- more than the sum of half-cloud, full moon, the smell of rust from the ships that scuttle by.
--Kenneth L. Clark
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