short burst
There was a lot of water. It moved.
Flowed. Rippled. Shadows depended on the structures that produced them, not on
the light source. A single sun, whose position changed throughout the day, sat
high above the horizon, but you could see that it would not be there later on.
You could not easily detect motion. It was hard to focus. But you could
continue to see, as long as you kept your eyes open. Based on your observations
of the relative position of an object over time, you might surmise that it
moved. There was a little path to the right that I hadn’t seen before. This
surprised me, and I realized the extent of my ignorance in the fact that in all
the times I had gone this way I’d been so overwhelmed by the volume of
unfamiliar sights and experiences that I had failed to exercise what I had
always thought of as an acute sensitivity to my surroundings. There was a large
fallen tree lying sideways on the path. It must have blown over in the storm
yesterday, but it was hard to know for sure, in this place, when it might have
fallen. The indigents might have left it where it was for months, or even
years, deciding that, for whatever inscrutable reason, this was a good location
for it. I finished my walk and went back home. I ate my breakfast, then went
and sat down in the living room. But after a time I decided he wanted to go
back out and take some pictures of the fallen tree. I returned to find a group
of what I understood to be townies standing around the fallen tree. They were
having what I might have loosely termed a conversation. I stopped a good
distance away from them to observe. It was always a good idea to gather
information before inserting oneself into a situation. Their “conversation” was
punctuated by long silences. In fact, it might have been more accurate to say
that they were engrossed in a prolonged silence punctuated by short bursts of
speech. One of them would say something, then all of them would look at the
tree, nodding, or shaking their heads, then they would look back at each other
and stand there in silence for another long while. Finally, someone else would
say something, and the whole process would repeat itself. From where I was
standing, I could not decipher what they were saying, I could only hear the
quiet sound of their voices mixed with the song of the river behind them.
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Ken Sparling has recent stories in R&R magazine. He is the author of eight novels. He is oninstagram @kensparling, and online at kensparling.ca and kensparling.github.io.