One-Sentence Story: First River

River Bank in Winter by Paul Gauguin

In the beginning, it wasn’t a river, but a road, a road where there used to be a river, a river that led to the sea and then a curving road that led away, away from that place, and there were houses along the road, so many different sizes and colors of houses where the Sycamore trees had been, Sycamore trees that drank down the fresh, clear water that was now a road along the river bed, and this was where we lived, on that road, in a house that wasn’t a Sycamore tree, and smooth, round river stones, silvery white and silvery gray, were in the dry, sandy dirt, and I dug them up with broken branches and with my hands, and they were precious gems, and then what I remember was that a fire came and it burned the hills so bare that only a few sticks were left in the ground and the sticks crumbled when I touched them and made black marks on my hands, and then there was rain and rain and rain, and nothing left to hold down the dirt, and that was why the mud started, yellow-brown mud that people were afraid of, and it came out of the hills, the hills with only a few black sticks in them, and people were out in the rain at night, digging and digging the mud, all night long, and filling up bags and piling up bags and shouting, but it was too late, too late, and the rain kept coming and the yellow-brown mud that people were so afraid of kept coming, and in the morning I went to see and there it was: the river, a rushing, churning, yellow-brown river where there used to be a curving road, and I stood there so glad in white plastic rain boots.

by Nina Zolotow

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