by Jeff Wheeler
Jason stood up too fast. The chair canted backward and banged into the wall. He let it fall, and strode to the sink. Both hands clasped the cold stainless steel as he breathed deeply of the draft from the open window. Granting wishes! As if the river was some beneficent genie, a simple mender of broken toys and finder of lost things.
Well, perhaps she had been that, from time to time. But nothing was ever that simple, not completely. Jason closed his eyes. Down by the river, the wind chimes sang arrhythmically, and the carnations he’d planted that spring shone pink and red in between the shrubbery. Despite his best efforts the words dripped out of his mouth, like the leaky faucet he’d never fixed: “Do you realize what you could have done?”
She held so still he could feel her lack of movement, the sudden absence of six-year-old wiggling and bouncing. He drank down a cool damp breath from the window, held it in his lungs for as long as he could, blew it back out. “Laurel,” he said. Maybe she was ready. Not to offer a broken toy boat, no. But he couldn’t keep her from giving things to the river, not forever. Not unless she understood. “Do you want to hear a story?”
A shuffle of bare feet on linoleum. When he looked over, a sharp crease pinched between her brows. “Okay,” she said.
They sat down at the table with the superglue and the pieces of the boat scattered atop a towel. Jason worked his tongue in his mouth and tried to find the story’s beginning. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a man.”
Laurel stared down at her hands in her lap under the table. “What kind of man?” she asked her scabby knees. “What was his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He passed her the tiny cap from the glue to hold, and ignored her scrunched face. “What matters is that he was lonely. He lived by himself, worked alone. No else to talk to. So he was lonely.”
The cap rolled across the tabletop under Laurel’s fingers. “So he left something for the river,” she said, and darted a glance at Jason’s face.
He nodded. The tip of the glue bottle traced the jagged rectangle where the boat’s cabin had sheared off. “He didn’t know that was what he was doing. But he planted mayflower down by the water, and left things lying around. Forgotten fishing lures and sandwich crusts, and maybe even a rake. Things the river liked, as it happened. He was still lonely, of course. But he started to have strange good luck, maybe even before he noticed anything was different. Sunshine on his shoulders on a cold day, or a good catch.” He pressed the cabin into the line of glue he’d drawn and held it there. “You have to be careful, Laurel, what you offer the river. Because she’ll take it, whatever it is, whether you mean to offer it or not.” He leaned over the half-mended boat. “Did you know your aunt Kathy left a couple of cigarette butts down by the water the first time she visited us here?”
A scandalized giggle from Laurel. “Dad! Aunt Kathy doesn’t smoke.”
“Not anymore, she doesn’t.” He’d warned Kathy, of course, but she hadn’t listened. He wasn’t sure he would have believed his sister either, if the situation had been reversed. “Now every time she puts a cigarette in her mouth, it’s as soggy as if it’d been lying on the riverbank for a week.”
Laurel didn’t say a word as she processed this, but her feet kicked against the seat of her chair. Finally she said, “Well, why doesn’t she just leave a new offering and ask the river to stop doing that?”
“She’s tried.” Jason twirled the boat’s mast against the tip of the glue bottle until it gleamed. It slid neatly into the jagged slot that it had come from, and he held it there. “If the river doesn’t like your offering, that’s the last one she ever takes from you. Whether you meant it as an offering or not. There’s a kind of . . . symbolism to offerings, things they mean and secrets they hide. And it’s hard for people to really understand what it is they’re saying to the river, or asking her for.” Even when it had been explained to him, he hadn’t really understood. Human ears weren’t made to hear that kind of language, and human eyes weren’t meant to see it. You could get lucky with an offering, certainly. Or you might be left standing by a silent shoreline. His fingertips squeezed the mast, painfully. “I didn’t want to tell you that. To make you afraid that she’d stop listening to you. But I’ve told you a thousand times, Laurel—”
“To be careful what I leave by the river.” Her head was bowed and her messy curls cast her face in shadow. Her hands clutched the seat of the chair, and her feet had stopped kicking. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Terrible silence stretched out between them while Jason fumbled for the right words to say. There’s nothing to be sorry about wasn’t quite right, and I forgive you was too high-handed. Go add superglue to the grocery list was totally unacceptable.
But Laurel saved him from that struggle. She peeked up through her tangle of hair, and he froze under her blue-eyed stare. “Daddy?” she asked. “What did the lonely man leave for the river, so that he wouldn’t be lonely anymore?”
“Ah.” He looked down at the boat. “Well, that’s between the man and the river. But what he gave, the river liked. And so she came to live with him.”
Her mouth hung open, and then she pushed back her chair so that it tilted onto two legs. Her knees kept her anchored to the table while she shook her head at the ceiling. “Dad, that’s silly. This is a made-up story! How could a river live in a house?”
“Well, she didn’t look like a river anymore.” He smiled down at the mast, which held true when he let go. A glossy line of glue had dried on one fingernail too. Now there was just a crack left in the top of the boat. He traced it with the tip of the glue bottle. “She looked like a lady, with eyes like cornflowers and the thickest black hair you’ve ever seen.”
The front legs of Laurel’s chair dropped back to the floor with a one-two clatter. “Was she pretty?” Laurel whispered, and Jason nodded.
“As beautiful as the river. And the man wasn’t lonely anymore. He loved the river. And she probably loved him too.” He squeezed the outside of the boat’s hull to bring the edges of the split together. The boat wouldn’t be fully watertight after this, but it should hold up unless it capsized. It would have to do. “For as long as she could.”
Laurel sat as still as a windless day. “What happened to her?”
“Nothing happened, really. Years went by, and I think maybe it’s not easy for a river to be a person instead of a river.” To be small, to be weak, to eat and hiccup and bleed. He checked the boat over one last time, then slid it across the table. Laurel didn’t pick it up. “Imagine going from being this thundering giant, full of life and power, to being one small person with just one ticking heart inside.” Laurel’s eyebrows drew into a frown, and who could blame her? He didn’t understand it any better than she did. He shrugged, a little jerk of one shoulder. “Well, she managed as long as she could, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she went back.”
“And the man was lonely again.”
He studied her across the table, the familiar dark tangle of curls, those too-bright blue eyes like sunlight on the water. “No,” he said. “He was never lonely again.”
One of Laurel’s hands crept out, then pulled the boat toward her chest. “Thank you for my boat, Daddy,” she said, and slid out of her chair. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Careful with it,” he said automatically, and she fled.
For the next hour or two, soft thumps and padded footsteps came through the kitchen ceiling from Laurel’s room. Jason stayed at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the Sunday newspaper, and tried not to be too curious about what she was up to. Occasionally she emerged on brief excursions: to the bookshelves in the living room, where she grabbed a stack of beloved picture books. To the kitchen, where she stuffed something from the fridge inside her shirt before haring off again. When the sounds grew still, Jason couldn’t pretend to read the letters to the editor any longer. He left his coffee to cool, and padded up the stairs.
Laurel’s door stood a few inches ajar, and he leaned again
st the jamb to peer inside. On the carpet lay hints of her mysterious project: the spine of her favorite book, a Jazz Age retelling of Cinderella, with only a jagged line down the middle to show where all the pages had been torn out. A Styrofoam tray of hamburger meat, open to the air and oozing reddish-brown. An old bottle of ladies’ perfume, pilfered from the top of the dresser in Jason’s bedroom. And no Laurel.
He came all the way into the room, and peered down through her bedroom window. There she was, sneaking outside in the rain with her secret handiwork clutched close to her heart. She meant to offer something to the river, he realized, purposefully this time, and his heart thundered in his chest like the rain against the windows.
He took the stairs two at a time. The screen door, well oiled, did not screech to announce his approach, and Laurel didn’t turn to look as he followed her several paces back. When his ankle turned on a hidden obstacle, he stifled a curse and looked down to see what had almost given him away. It was Laurel’s toy fisherman, head-down in the grass and the mud—not lost at sea after all. He stuck the little yellow-suited man into his pocket and kept on after Laurel.
She pushed between the riverside shrubberies, and crouched down with whatever treasures she carried. Jason recognized her plastic cup from the bathroom as he watched her dip her finger inside and use the contents to draw on her face. What was she drawing? “Having babies,” she said. “That means blood. I know that.” She had her back to Jason, and he didn’t dare move closer. He couldn’t interrupt her, not now. Next she bent and picked up one of the pages of her Cinderella book. She tore it into strips, and the strips disappeared into her mouth. “Bedtime stories and secrets,” she said. This was the river’s language, Jason knew, could feel it prickling the hairs on the back of his neck. Laurel spoke it unflinchingly and instinctively. What did she think she was asking for, and what exactly did she mean to give?
Now she stood up and shredded the rest of her book’s pages like confetti, letting the wind take them from her hands. One clear laugh rolled through the rain to Jason. And then Laurel took one great step over the edge of the bank and into the river.
He cried out before the sound of the splash even reached him. The grass was slippery under his feet and the tangle of mayflower grabbed at his ankles as he leaped over. Cold water closed over his head like a finished storybook, and with it came panic. Water filled his mouth, but all he tasted was the bitter sting of adrenaline. It was all too familiar and too strange all at once. He’d been here before and shouldn’t have survived to have another go. At least the river was full of warm summer rain this time rather than the last of the snowmelt. It wrapped him in its too-familiar embrace.
No. No time for the drag of memory now. He kicked off his shoes, reached forward, pulled himself through the water. His head broke the surface and there was Laurel, only a few yards out. She struggled to keep her head above water. When he shouted wordlessly to her, she spun, arms thrashing. He dived under once more, reaching, reaching.
She slipped under the surface just as he reached her, and her tiny arms locked around his neck. He yanked her, not gently, around to his back. He wished for a moment to simply hold her—but instead of riding the current, now he had to fight sideways across it to make for the riverbank. Leaden arms pulled against the water, weary legs thrashed. They went under together again, half a dozen times, tumbled relentlessly by the current. In his ear, between sputters, Laurel pleaded for him not to be angry, Daddy, please.
They finally floundered ashore just south of Buckthorn Island. Laurel huddled, small and shivering, under his arm while he tried to get enough air into his lungs to say: What were you thinking, why did you do this, don’t you know what could have happened? But she wrapped her fists into his shirt and said, “Dad, Daddy, it’s all right, don’t be mad! I know what the man offered the river.”
“Laurel,” he said, and now the cold that soaked him was more than physical. Terror had frozen him to a psychological absolute zero, and there was no breath for more words, no movement in his lungs.
“I knew how to ask, just like you said, Daddy. Just like the man did, but not exactly the same. I don’t need the same thing as he did. And I knew what I was asking for.” The weight of her head on his chest, a million miles away, the soft reminder of sunlight on a cold and distant planet. “He offered himself. Maybe he didn’t know that’s what he was doing then, but that’s what he gave her. Isn’t it?”
“Laurel,” he said, and his arms folded around her like a convulsion. She went still against him, holding him as tightly as he held her. “What did you ask the river for?”
“Daddy,” she said. Her voice was small, confused. A little hurt. Close by, the waters of the river had begun to stir and froth. Jason knew the answer even before Laurel spoke it aloud, and his eyes squeezed shut against the burn of tears. “I asked her for my mom. Do you think she’ll listen?”
About Aimee Ogden
Aimee Ogden lives in Wisconsin with her husband, three-year-old twins, and very old dog. A former software tester and science teacher, she now writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses.
LULLABY FOR THE TREES
By Sarina Dorie | 10,000 Words
A SINGLE NOTE rose out of Mama’s throat. It was so beautiful, I forgot my cold and only felt wonder. The high, sweet song wove a pattern in the trees around her, brilliant sparks of magic bursting like fireworks in the dark shadows under the ancient boughs. I rubbed my eyes in awe. This had to be my imagination playing tricks on me, something inspired by watching too much television.
Mama’s voice could melt hearts and sing the forest awake. At least, that’s what Papa said. Tonight she sang, and the great oaks shivered. The twisted apple tree above her unbent his trunk and straightened to his full height. The air filled with the perfume of apple cider and autumn, making me feel safe and content.
I watched from behind a cluster of birches some distance from the immense apple tree. In that moment, I came to believe the folktales from the old country. My parents had told me about vilas, the maidens who were nature fairies, and leshii, the tree people. The grandfather apple tree came alive. His cracked bark smoothed, reminding me of human flesh, and the surface of his trunk gathered into an expression of admiration. He spoke with a voice as resonant as church bells, and when he sang, I knew I was in a sacred sanctuary.
The twisted limbs remained still, but they creaked and groaned as if dancing in a windstorm. Mama raised her arms, and her cape fell open, exposing the pale gown she wore underneath that looked like it belong to another time. Papa often teased her about being a romantic. Only being six, I wasn’t sure what a romantic was. I suspected it had something to do with kissing, something my parents were quite fond of.
Mama danced around the tree, singing with joy. A percussion of pops and clicks echoed around us and vibrated through my body. My fingers twitched, and my toes, numb with cold, warmed in the embrace of music. She and the tree sang a duet. The grandfather apple tree’s roots shifted as she danced around him. Any moment it felt as though he might uproot himself and twirl her in his arms.
I found myself swaying to the melody. When the first note escaped my lips, the forest music soured into silence. The magic died. The tree was just a tree. The air no longer smelled of hot apple cider and merriment, but rotting apples and wet mildew.
My mother leaned against the gnarled trunk, out of breath and spent. She looked up at me and frowned.
Knowing I would be in big trouble for spying, I ran. She called after me, but I didn’t heed her words. I raced along the moonlit path. My feet crunched past the caved-in shack and then through the field of our neighbor’s farm. In a few more minutes, I rushed up the porch steps and snuck back inside. A floorboard creaked as I tiptoed to bed. The pounding of my heart was loud enough I was surprised I didn’t wake Papa. I expected to hear Mama march up to the door, the creak of rusty hinges signaling her arrival. I waited to be chewed out.
In the morning, Papa woke me. He didn�
�t question why twigs were stuck to the hem of my nightgown or why my bare feet were covered in dirt. “Dobryj ranok, Liliya,” he said in Ukrainian.
Usually I greeted him with, “Speak English, Papa. Say ‘good morning,’ ” but this morning I just swallowed.
He ruffled my hair like nothing was wrong and opened the avocado-green refrigerator. He set about preparing the kutya sweet porridge for breakfast. I peeked into my parents’ bedroom. Mama wasn’t there.
“She’ll be back soon, my little flower.” The corners of Papa’s eyes crinkled as he smiled at me. “Don’t worry.”
Mama still hadn’t returned by the time breakfast was ready. The third bowl of kutya remained on the table long after we finished dishes. I stared out the window at the muddy road. The crisp gold of the leaves contrasted with the gray gloom of the sky.
Papa laced up his old boots. I knew it was my fault she hadn’t come back. I’d disturbed the magic. I’d heard Mama talk about not displeasing the spirits of the trees in the past.
“Stay put, my little one,” Papa said. “Do your schoolwork. It is due tomorrow, ni?”
My gaze cut to the backpack in the corner made from a patchwork of jeans my mother had sewn together. Her embroidery looked quaint and old-world compared to the Spiderman and Barbie backpacks of other children my age. Of course, the other kids weren’t immigrants like we were either.
“Or you could watch the television,” Papa winked.
Usually that would have filled me with joy since my mother only let me watch three hours on the weekend, and I’d already filled my quota yesterday, but nothing could lighten the weight on my heart.
I watched from the window as Papa skipped down the muddy path through our field and into the neighbor’s. He came back an hour later carrying her in his arms. His face was stricken, eyes glazed and unseeing. He’d wrapped her up in her cloak, but there wasn’t enough fabric to disguise the crimson stains on her white dress. Her arm was covered in bruises. Gashes marred her skin.