The River! The River!

So begins my story, strange... Young woman in tattered clothes, looking years far beyond her age, lips move, prattling to herself - sitting at a pressed-wood table, imbrued by the fade of black ink, bladed carvings of chicken scratch obscene, tho', barely legible, through wood-grooves and divots that time and storm left 'long with dark splintered shards obscuring a soft, clear view. Then, of course there were- the hand-happy wood slammers purging their confetti of manic emotions within the un-holy confinds of a stenched, human bandbox, mundungus and fullsome. She has witnessed great horror, tho' guilty of nothing, her congenital mental state offers skewed specifics..., to validate her insidious experiences. Then, suddenly her green eye's open large, expressively- as though she'd been deep in dream, a dream of surreal encounter, frighteneing her senses awake. The River! The River! ....she begins to shout; her pupils dancing with petrified verve. Then there was silence...for a very long time....., for a very, long time....................................- And tho' it seemed her vibrant eyes had so much more to say, her four other senses were stricken, while she stared into a blue sea of shirts with numbers on sheilds in shiny silver, who proceded to defer to those standing with darker, plain clothes, with their hideous K-Mart ties well hung over their belted flies..., and who strategically made yeoman efforts to crack the imbrued, skewed stem of the womans anemic brain... All for nought - like attempting to turn a sestina into an ode wasting pecious Time! Time...fascinating...yet ne're a friend to tides or justice. And so............................, Two weeks later they found what they needed to find two weeks sooner than they did. The body was pulled from a river, a shallow river... and had to be thawed from fourteen days of an ice-glaced December. Some silver shields would soon turn to gold for the yeoman's effort in kind, for their days and weeks, of attempting to tap wine from a carafe of fruit juice... And the mentally deprived woman remained true to her story, and for nights long after returning back home, neigbors would be awakened in the mid-night hours to the eerie chanting of the woman in dream. The River! The River! Each night a virtual freeze-frame... Neighbors moved; Houses gutted, the land was soon turned over - yet, to this day no one really knows what happened so many years ago. Old woman, now one-hundred and three, tho' some sware, a half score more; self-imprisoned in her house all by herself...still sticken by time and events. No one can hear her wallowing by the stove. Perhaps this is how it must be. Last June I heard that the river had dried, and though July rains were in plenty- the serpentine water-path never drinks; perhaps this is how it must be. So ends my story, strange. © Frank James Ryan, Jr. 2015-All rights reserved