The thing in the River

A Story by AlphaGemini

The Thing in The River

There is a thing in the river.

I discovered it by accident, many years ago as a child. Then it was but a stream, gurgling past my low, white weatherboard house where the raised voices of my parents rattled the walls.

The paddocks behind stretched far and wide, lined by pine, maple, sycamore and willow. And just scant meters from the dwelling a muddy creek. Small, back in those days.

That one day I ran to it, crying. The house shook with argument behind me, again.

Then was the first time I heard it speak.

It asked me, what sorrow could be so great. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Though I know now that it was submerged, I could hear it clear as day. The whisper of water over rounded stone. The softening rush that gentled hardened edge. The quiet burble of passing time. Thus was its voice to my ears.

Sniffing, I told it of my troubles. And like no one and nothing in time would, it listened.

Days flowed by. Months. I grew, and with me so it seemed did the thing.

In the beginning I tried to tell of its being, the creature in my back yard. None heeded my words. My parents, consumed as they were by grown-up things, tutted at my child's fancy. An imaginary companion, they insisted. Nothing more. When my ministrations did not cease then came the doctors, and later the pills. They made me feel foggy and distant, seeing the world through steamed glass. Only when I admitted to my fallacy did they relent. I lied.

Through young adulthoods cruel passage it kept me company. The stream, now a wide brook flowed strong and noisily, almost as energetic in its youth as I was.

The thing listened to my follies and failures, rejoiced with me in my petty triumphs, trivial though they seem now through the looking-glass of age. And it too told me of its own realm.

It spoke of the nightlands with ghostly white luminescent grass that waved as if underwater, beneath a moon that never set.

It spoke of the spaces between life and elsewhere, inside which passed loved ones could be communed with.

And then the day came. My parents, for machinations unknown to my youthful mind, sold our house. The thing was confused. People did not own the land. Deeds were inconsequential, the earth heeded not the demands and rights of paper. It mattered not to the hills what the tiny scurrying beings upon them had wrote of their indenture, of their possession. People were, after all, temporary. The soil and rock and gully; forever. What did it care the permissions of men?

I was remiss. The creature, less so. It did not measure itself in days nor years, I think, not like we do. Perhaps that is why it has always been there, as if waiting for me to pass by again. Mere centuries a blink.

And so we left and I bid my only childhood friend a tearful goodbye. It told me we would meet again, in this world or the nightlands. I promised my return, but it merely gurgled in its watery way. I don't think, in the end, it mattered.

We moved towns, and I schools. I was as usual, a lonesome soul. Perhaps things of this plane no longer held anyone of continuity enough for me to identify with. Until I met her.

The years passed. Either time weathered me or I it. I grew and learned, attending such schools and universities that allowed or garnered my further seclusion. My days then were spent in silent study, wherein I roamed the realms of academia.

I studied the sciences, learnt the inner workings of the universe and how to unravel the secrets there. None of it explained to me the distant memories of the strange being of my youth. None told of worlds adjacent to ours where the sun never rose.

Then one day I saw it. The brightest of lights. She came to me, in the library in the dead of night where I was wont to roam the deserted isles and have weigh upon my mind the questions posed by heavy tomes. It's dungeons in those days were my kingdom.

Brow furrowed, frowning. Disheveled and hair a-frizz. She jabbed a finger at the column of books next to me; where I sat. Annoyed, she proclaimed her vain search for one of the titles I had secreted in my pile. I gave it to her, and though my heart raced too fast for thought, I invited her to my reading table, as it had the comfiest chairs in the place. In a grumpy huff, she sat to read. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

But three summers later we married. To this day I administer that I looked the gawkish fool next to her radiance in white. To this day also, like those other mysteries that captured my imagination, I cannot understand my luck. Love, it would seem, was as unquantifiable as those midnight knolls that still eluded my capture. My parents, at the wedding, sat apart.

We lived. For a time I was complete. My knowledge of the physical realm grew to great heights, yet she still remained my superior in many things. I was by no means a home-body and alas I admit that without her guidance I surely would have perished. It was as if she was the greater half of our circle. And then yet still the miracles she provided came ceaseless.

Never will I forget the first time my infant son, newborn, grabbed onto my large finger. It was as if a tether connected us in that moment between our souls, intangible, unbreakable. Another inexplicable phenomenon.

While he grew the lines and valleys of our faces grew deeper and sharper. It was in his fifth winter that I bought our house. A low dingy weather-boarded thing out in the rurals.

The day came when the living room was piled high with cardboard boxes and tiny feet raced throughout the house. I took my boy and we snuck out the rear to the wide braided river there. It cut a path clear through the patch-work of paddocks and pastures, a winding vein-ridden arm of rounded stone pebbles worn smooth over time.

There I stood back and watched as he ran, stumbling to the water’s edge. Time had not yet taught him to fear the unknown. So there, where the reeds grew long and lined the bank, where the rush of the water grew loudest, he spoke.

To a thing I could not see from my vantage. And it replied to him, in its quiet watery way.

My son smiled. I know not to this day what he or it had said. But I know that he had made a friend.

© 2018 AlphaGemini

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Akash gaikwad

Every sentence is very written very thoughtfully!! It is very spiritual one need a very deep understanding of souls communication to understand this. At the end though he could see from his vantage but he felt and that's a way soul communicates. Amazing lot to learn from you. Thanks for sharing this amazing story.