"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"Children Made of Stone"

 

Lars knew as soon as he saw his new neighbor step onto her front porch and close the door behind her that she was coming over to introduce herself, which is to say that she was coming over to complain about his kids. There was a certain stiffness of posture and weakness of smile that preceded questions like Do they run around like that all the time? and Lars had learned to spot it well. What he hadn't learned was how to make someone believe that his children would turn to stone if ever they stopped moving.

"Daddy, I'm hungry!" Bianca called as she and James ran around the ash tree in the corner. Lars shook himself free of his thoughts and reached down to the table for one of the sandwiches he had brought outside for lunch. He thought about telling her to run over and pick it up, but then, even as he was watching their neighbor cross her lawn toward them, he decided otherwise and instead jogged toward the ash tree, sandwich in hand, to join the kids in their game of circles. It was the least he could do for the children he would never be able to hold.

"Askew"

 

"That streetlamp over there," the man said, pointing at a decorative lighting fixture on the other side of the road, "is leaning way too far over, don't you think?"

Its metal body jutted a few feet into the roadway space, like a thrillseeker seeing how far she could lean over a cliff, whereas normally it stood a few feet taller and vertical, like a poet enjoying the view. "That could be an issue," the woman acknowledged.

"Someone should probably be called about that," the man said. He took his phone with him into another room but returned twenty minutes later, banging the phone against his forehead.

"I was on hold for, like, fifteen minutes," he informed her. "I finally got someone who connected me to another department, who said they'd place the request for repair in the appropriate crew's work queue, but I could expedite the request if I came in and filled out form jay-one-six-I-don't-freaking-know."

The woman nodded in response and went outside. The man looked on as she lay on her belly on the path leading to their porch, with her head close to the stones that filled in their landscaping. "If you could talk to your friends underneath, please?" she said.

"Not a problem," said a voice that came from the cluster of stones. Instantly the earth below them gave a shudder, and the shudder rippled across the street like a wave in the pond. The man and the woman watched as the ground around the streetlamp churned, pushing the pole upright.

The woman sat up on the walkway and the man came outside to sit next to her. "Sometimes it's just a matter of knowing how you can best make change happen," she said. "I mean, to be fair, that office you called is really good with the water bills." They saw a utility truck drive by them, zipping past the decorative lamp that the earth had stood straight.