The Destined Path of Water Chapter 12: Chapter 12: Have You Eaten

Read chapter 12 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae The gathering broke up slowly the way these things always did, in clusters, people finding each other and drifting off together, conversations continuing as people walked away from the river. I rolled up my sign and tucked it under my arm and stood there for a moment not entirely sure what to do next. She was walking away from the table, having signed whatever she had signed, and she walked past me at a slight angle that was not quite away and not quite toward, the particular trajectory of someone who has not decided yet which direction they are going. I fell into step beside her without deciding to. We walked for a moment without speaking. The path followed the river for a stretch before turning up toward the lane that led back to the road, and the river was visible through the trees on our left, moving slow and low between the stones. I said, "Your sign was better than mine." She glanced at me. "It was straighter," she said. "Also better," I said. "These rivers are alive. That is the right thing to say. I said the obvious thing." She was quiet for a moment. "Save our rivers is not wrong," she said. "It is not wrong but it is not " I tried to find the word. "It is not what I actually think. What I actually think is closer to what you said." She looked at me with a slight expression I could not fully read. Not suspicious exactly. More like someone recalibrating something. We reached the turn in the path where it went up toward the road and she slowed without stopping, the way you slow when you are about to go a different direction but have not committed to it yet. I said, "Have you eaten." She blinked. "What." "Have you eaten. It is almost noon and I have not eaten and there is a place up the road that does good things with eggs and I thought " I stopped. I had not thought anything actually. The sentence had started and I had followed it to see where it went. "Sorry. That was you do not have to." She looked at me for a moment. Then she looked up the road. Then she said, "I have not eaten either." Rika The place up the road was very small. Four tables, two of which were occupied by old men who had clearly been there long enough to have opinions about everyone who came in. A woman behind the counter who looked at us when we came in and then looked at a specific table in the corner as if directing us there by the force of her attention alone. We sat at the table in the corner. He put his rolled-up sign against the wall and looked at the menu written on the board above the counter and said, "The eggs here are genuinely very good. I am not overselling them." "You have been here before," I said. "Many times. It is on the way back from the river." He paused. "I go to the river a lot." "I know," I said. "You mentioned the waterfall." "Four years," he said. "I have been watching it for four years." He said it like he was confirming something to himself as much as to me. Then he looked at the menu board again. "Do you want tea." "Yes," I said. He ordered tea and eggs and something with rice and I ordered the same because I did not know the menu and it seemed like the right approach with someone who had strong feelings about the eggs. The woman behind the counter wrote nothing down and disappeared into the back. I looked at him across the table. He was the kind of person whose face was easy to read, not because he was simple but because he was not performing anything. What he thought moved across his face the way weather moves across hills, visible from a distance, not hidden. He was looking at the table now with the slightly unfocused look of someone thinking about something that was not in the room. "What made you start going to the protests," I said. He looked up. "The waterfall," he said. "And the river level. And a village meeting I went to uninvited when I was fifteen." He paused. "And something else that I cannot really explain." I waited to see if he would explain it anyway. He did not. He looked at me lik