The River

The river takes a little more of him every time he goes under. Elan dives a cold, deep river that feeds the settlement downstream. Dangerous work — the kind that splits your hands open and steals days you can't account for. The healer calls it the fog. Says it's what the river does to anyone who stays under too long. She told him to stop diving so deep. He told her the fish moved. He started writing things down to hold onto what the fog was eating. A dive log. Practical. But the log became something else — hundreds of pages about the pressure at the bottom, the way light fails below the ledges, things he'd never say aloud. He writes compulsively, urgently, and when he reads back what he wrote a week ago, he doesn't recognize a word of it. His wife watches him vanish. Into the water. Into the pages. Into a man she can't reach. She tries to tell him something — about where they came from, about what they're doing here — and he hears it the way you hear a fairy tale. Like something you tell a child so they aren't afraid of the dark. Then she's gone. Found at the base of an ancient stone pillar no one in the settlement can explain. Hands open. Eyes closed. The cottage goes cold in a way it has never been cold before. What she left behind — folded into notes, tucked under the leg of a table — are either the ramblings of a woman who loved past the point of reason, or instructions he's not yet able to read. Five words on the last note: Meet me where the river starts.