Ron Rash

Water-flesh gleamed like mica: orange fins, red flankspots, a char shy as ginseng, found only in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear of faraway creeks no map could name. My cousin showed me those hidden places. I loved how we found them, the way we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in, and lift as from a well bright shadows of another world, held in my hand, their color already starting to fade.

Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling. Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather thinking This is my life and catching himself before he was caught lost wages or fingers the risk of reflection. Or another recalled in those reckoning moments remembering the mountains the hardscrabble farm where a workday as long bought no guarantee of money come fall full bellies in winter. To earn extra pay each spring he would climb the mill's water tower repaint the one word. That vowel heavy word defined the horizon a word my grandfather could not even read.

Before clock hands showed the time time ceased, and looking glasses were veiled as if they still held familiar faces, in those last moments when breath shallowed like a wellspring running dry, God-words quickened, only then the dying left death-beds borne on the arms of the gathered, lowered to the floor so they might press close, as though a door through which to listen and know the earth's old secrets before it opened, and they entered.

All that once was is this, shattered glass, a rot of tin and wood, the hum of limp-legged wasps that ascend like mote swirls in the heatlight. Out front a cherry tree buckles in fruit, harvested by yellow jackets and starlings, the wind, the rain, and the sun.