Like Drowning

Winter here dies like someone drowning. Snow claws back across the ground then recedes in gasps, clinging to the shadows of houses and trees until all at once it is over, drenched in sunlight, summer once again. 

And on that first really green day a young man stands by the river. He folds a boat from a sheet of paper and lights it on fire. He realizes a problem—as soon as the first flaming boat alights, it goes out. He kicks off his shoes and rolls his socks into them and goes to fetch it from where it’s caught (thankfully) on a drooping branch. 

It seems silly. If he could scarcely be bothered to do it, who else could possibly have the wherewithal to retrieve what has already ceased looking like a boat at all, unfold it as delicately as required to keep it from falling apart, and read the (likely smeared) ink on the page. Still, he ventures out, on principle if nothing else. Though the air is warm the river still stings with the last of the snowmelt and the small stones lining the bottom dig into his uncalloused feet. 

Once the “boat” is safely crumpled in one fist, he looks up and down from this mid-river vantage point and savors the cold. He wonders how far he could walk like this, and if it would make him stronger—his feet, his body, his brain. Not today. With a shiver and some splashing, he returns ashore and dries his feet in this new, bright sun.

So the boats must burn on land. The first he holds in his hand until it almost burns him, and flings the unreadable charcoal into the river. This feels like littering, so he tries something else. He looks around for a large flat rock and finds one that’s medium and lumpy, but it has space for three boats to burn in sequence. Boats no longer make very much sense, so he tries folding the paper in other ways, but boats are the only pattern he knows, so he returns to them.

He thought it would take longer than this. For all the harrowing and heartbreak, it wasn’t more than twenty sheets, forty pages if he counted both sides (but double spaces, so kind of a wash). He holds the last page in his hand and looks at it with love. It’s a dialogue between two characters who had once seemed so real to him. He’d drawn them clumsily in the margins of his notebooks, answered online quizzes as them to get to know them better, he’s daydreamed how he would explain their relationship to his adoring fans. in the end, they couldn’t even carry him through fifty pages. He knew he would forget them and it would be over, finally over.

His phone rings. He thought he’d turned it off. His sister asks where he is and more importantly where his headphones are and whether she can borrow them. As he’s hanging up, the wind takes his last page from him and deposits it in the river. He thinks about the cold, and those hard pebbles, and the mud on his feet that’s almost dry enough to flake off. And he thinks about how he’s never had luck getting anyone to read it before, and that won’t stop now, not for one single drowning page.

But it’s a lovely day for looking at the river. A young woman, wading with her friends, catches the paper. She sees that the sun-facing side, at least, is legible, and pulls it out of the water delicately with both hands. She sends for a flat rock and her friends provide, more-or-less, and they all sit around the page reverently, wondering what message the universe has sent them.

The one who rescued it leans over and gives it careful scrutiny. “It’s some fantasy thing, I guess. Lots of capitalized words I don’t understand.”

“Huh,” is about what her friends can muster. It seems wrong to throw the page away, so they leave it sunning on the rock. By the time anyone remembers to come back for it, it’s gone.