The Destined Path of Water Chapter 20: Chapter 20: The River Runs

Read chapter 20 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae I woke up on the riverbank with wet clothes and no memory of how I got there. The sky above me was pre-dawn, that particular dark that is not quite night anymore, the stars fading at the edges, the hills beginning to separate themselves from the sky in the east. I was lying on my back on the bank, the ground cold and damp beneath me, my clothes soaked through, and for a long moment I just lay there looking at the sky and waiting for my mind to catch up with my body. It did not fully catch up. I remembered the afternoon. The river path, the flat stones, sitting by the water in the cooling evening. And then nothing. Just the dark and the cold and waking here with wet clothes and the sense of something very recent that I could not locate. I sat up. The river was loud. That was the first thing. The river, which had been so quiet for so long, which I had been watching get quieter for two years, was loud. Fast and full and loud, the sound of it filling the whole valley, the white at the edges where it moved around the stones bright even in the pre-dawn dark. I stared at it. It was running the way it had run when I was young. No fuller than that. Running the way it must have run before I was born, before any of the changes, before any of the upstream diversions or the reduced flow or the decades of slow diminishment. Running like something that had been given back to itself. I stood up on unsteady legs and looked at it. I did not know what had happened. I did not know why I was here or why my clothes were wet or why the river was full or why I felt, somewhere below all the not-knowing, a grief with no object attached to it, a loss with nothing missing that I could name. I stood on the bank for a long time. Then, from somewhere up the valley, a sound. A crack first, sharp and enormous, the kind of sound that rearranges the air around it. Then a roar, building, the sound of a very large amount of water finding somewhere to go very quickly. I looked up the valley. The survey site. The place where the dam structure had been under preliminary construction for the past three months, the concrete foundations and the survey markers and the equipment I had photographed and included in the formal objection documents. Whatever had been built there was no longer standing. I could not see it from here but I could hear it in the water, in the way the river surged and rose and ran faster, the valley receiving what had been returned to it. The dam was gone. I stood on the bank in my wet clothes in the pre-dawn dark and listened to the river run and felt the grief with no name and did not understand any of it and could not stop the feeling that something was different now in a way that had nothing to do with the water. Something was gone that I could not account for. I went home as the first light came over the hills and my mother opened the door before I could knock and looked at my wet clothes and my face and asked no questions, just stepped aside and let me in, and I went upstairs and changed and sat on my bed and listened to the river, audible now even from here, loud and full and relentless, the way it was supposed to be. Rika I woke up in my room. Which was where I was supposed to wake up, which was ordinary, except that it was four in the morning and I was in my clothes from yesterday and my coat was damp at the edges and I had no memory of coming home. I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling. The bird stain looked back at me. Body too round, wings uneven, the companion shape near the window that was a fish in morning light and a leaf in the evening. Eight years of looking at this ceiling, eight years of this room, and it was entirely familiar and entirely ordinary and I could not remember the last few hours of the previous day and there was a feeling in my chest that had no name. Not pain exactly. Not sadness exactly. More like the feeling of waking from a dream you cannot remember but that left something be