The River

I wake up and fill my mouth with stones. Smooth and flat, the ones that are good for skipping across still water. The doctor said those are best.

“Big,” she also said. “They shouldn’t be pebbles. They should be stones.”

Her distinction seemed arbitrary, but I didn’t question it. Maybe it’s so as not to choke. She looked like a woman who had reasons for things, so that afternoon I set off to search for enough stones to stack in my mouth without choking. I can fit 17, but I have started to pick up extras whenever I come upon them, usually along the road or by the river. The doctor said they were rare so I like to have an excess. This morning I managed to fit 18 by tilting one on its side.

“Where are you going?” my husband asks, not looking up from the newspaper. I cannot answer because my mouth is full with the stones. He acts as though I have answered.

“I’m going for a hike,” I’ve said in his imagination. If he looked up from the newspaper, he would see my bulging mouth and my long silk robe loosely cinched with its white sash. He would see my toes peeking through my slippers and he would know I am not going for a hike.

“It’s a beautiful day for a hike,” he says. “Be careful of the snakes.”

I walk past my husband and exit the house through the kitchen door. I leave my slippers inside and go barefoot through the grass.

We are finally in the warm days of spring, but the water is still cold. The river is not a far walk from our house. The children used to walk there by themselves in the summertime.

“You don’t go with them?” the mothers in town asked, horrified. Why would I go? They were grown—11, 12. However old they were, they were grown. They were free when they went to the river. I was a better mother for not going. That’s what the boys said when they were older and I told them about the mothers in town.

All the kids in the neighborhood have grown and gone and no one comes to the river anymore for a swim. In the mornings, it is just me. I take off my robe and fold it. I place it at the base of a tall tree whose name I cannot recall and wade into the river naked, save for my stones. They are my adornment, like sixty hats stacked on top of each othe,r balancing on my head. That is the sensation in my mouth. It is the only feeling I have loved in years. There is something delicious about how they could all fall.

I bend my knees and submerge my body until all is swallowed save for my head. It is then that I dip my head back, kick my legs up and spread my arms wide. The water is cold and feels like pinpricks along the entire surface of my body. I am floating. The doctor said this might Happen.

“It takes a few tries, but you should see results within two weeks.” She didn’t tell me what the results would be, but I’m sure I will see them soon. This is only the second time I’ve gone into the river.

The stinging subsides and now the water only feels wet and lapping. I try to focus on the floating and the sensation in my neck. It is stiff from holding my head up, straining against the weight of the stones in my mouth. My long black hair swirls around my head, splintering off from itself in tendrils. The flecks of gray catch the sunlight and my hair sparkles. I know it will be heavy when I stand again. Time passes. I tip back before I lean forward and pull my feet down under me. I climb out of the river and let myself drip a while before I put on my robe and walk back home.

That night, when my husband comes to bed, I am already lying down. I am reading a book that lists hundreds of fungi in alphabetical order. The pictures are horrifying. I am only reading it because some strange growth seems to be taking over the pine tree in our front yard and I want to know if it is poisonous and if the tree will die because of it. I flip through the pictures trying to find a match. There are so many colors and types and textures that it feels as if there will be no way of knowing.

My husband has just taken a shower and has a towel wrapped snug around his middle and another towel in his hands, occasionally used to dab his face and hair. He is unconcerned about the growth on the pine tree.

“How was your hike?” he asks, taking a seat on his side of the bed. He faces the wall as he continues to dry his hair, still black after all these years. I set the book aside.

“It was good,” I say, stumbling over the words as my tongue learns to speak without the stones in my mouth. “I forgot how big the snakes can be.”

*

I should have remembered to salt the yolks, I think, as I set down a fried egg in front of my husband. He is sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper as he does every morning.

“Thank you, love,” he says and pulls the plate toward him without shifting in his seat or meeting my eyes.

I go to the bathroom and set about my ritual with the stones. I guide two into my mouth, tilted on their sides so their flat surfaces are pressed flush against the inside of my cheeks. Now I open wide, tongue sticking out, and begin to stack, starting as far back on my tongue as I can. I fill cracks with the smaller stones I’ve recently collected until I can barely press my lips together. I stare at myself in the mirror for a moment. Something I haven’t done in ages. Just looking, not prodding or pulling or lifting. I look quite pretty, I think to myself. It is the same thought I had the night before my wedding, spinning in my veil. Now it is a perverse kind of beauty, of course, because of my splitting lips, but still delicate and elegant.

My robe drags along the floor as I walk toward the kitchen again. Its train has bright green patches along the trim, but no mud stains. I make a note to spot treat it when I come back from the river. I pass my husband who says, “Going to the market?” I press my hand lightly on his shoulder as I pass, as if to say yes.

“Will you get more peaches?”

I trail my hand down his arm and walk out through the front door.

It is now my fifth time at the river and I fold my robe and place it at the foot of the same tree I’ve come to like, and call in my head, “My tree.”

Each trip to the river has made me lighter, more buoyant, even though I have figured out how to trick more stones into fitting in my mouth. I step into the icy water and stand an equal distance from each riverbank. I sink at the knees until my hair dips into the water and I gently spring my legs forward and my head backward and submerge myself. Once the water cascades over the crown of my head and onto my face and chest, I can feel it press my body upwards and I rise. It’s as if the river has its fingertips against my back, allowing my shoulder blades to scrape its surface. Today, it has lifted me so high, I am nearly out of the water.

I don’t know how long I am supposed to stay like this, I didn’t ask the doctor. I stay until the sun passes the halfway mark in the sky and then wait a little longer until it sinks lower, toward night. Eventually, I stand, put my robe on and let it cling to my wet, shivering body. I am always colder out of the water than I ever am in it.

I remove the stones and place them at the base of my tree. I will have to come back for them, I think before walking in the direction of the market to buy peaches. I do not expect to see anyone at the market so early in the evening on a weekday. Most everyone I know is at work, and those who don’t work—like the mothers in town who did not like how I raised my boys—don’t come to this market. They go to the flashy one in town and call it a store. I say, “A market is a store,” and they roll their eyes because clearly I do not understand. The store buys its fruit from the market, but I do not tell them this.

I do not see any of these women at the market, of course, but I see my doctor who seems happy to see me. She is shorter than I am and gestures up to my face with one hand.

“Ah,” she smiles. “How was the river?”

I feel an instant warmth toward her. Her weathered skin has a stiff shine to it and when she smiles she forms crinkles all over her face. She closes her eyes when she speaks passionately and gestures wildly with her little hands.

“It was good,” I say. “I keep floating higher and higher.”

She takes my hand in both of hers and shakes it.

“Good! Good!” she says, and I am relieved to hear that it’s working.

“Come see me next week,” she says. “Monday.”

I nod and say that I will, but now I have to buy peaches for my husband. She tells me to buy one for myself, too. She says I am looking thin. If I were younger, she would say no boy wants to marry a skeleton, but my husband and I have been married for many years. No boy wants to marry an old lady; she does not have to say this. I tell her I will buy one for myself, and I walk toward the produce in my robe, no longer wet and clinging to me in an obscene way. I take a peach in each hand and feel how heavy they are. At first, I assume it is because of their pit, dense and floating in the middle. But it is the flesh surrounding it, full of juice and heavy as lead in my palm. I buy three and walk home under a pink sky.

*

My doctor’s office is small and entirely un-office-like. It is in a hut on the river, far from my house. About an hour away on foot. I take my time in the river before climbing out for the long walk in the sun. It will undoubtedly dry my hair and robe before I get to her office, not that she would mind. She is the only person whose gaze doesn’t linger on the silk clinging to my damp breasts. No, she keeps her eyes fixed on the apples of my cheeks, tilting her head up when she needs to meet my eyes.

Today, she is waiting for me in the exam room with the door open. She says my name with the excitement of a mother greeting her child. I bow my head and return a weak smile.

“Forgive me,” I say, feeling as though I owe her an explanation. “I am so tired these

days, I can barely lift my eyelids.”

She says she understands and calls me “dear.” She pats the examination table, and I climb up and lean back on the white parchment; its crinkling is so loud that I reach to plug my ears.

“How is the river?” She keeps a hand on my skin at all times, sometimes standing to reach my shoulder. Mostly, she keeps a kind hand on the knee. Her touch anchors me to the moment in real time. Without her palm pressed against my flesh, I’m certain I’d float off the examination table and through the thatched roof of her hut.

I try to answer her question, but I can barely get the words out, suddenly overtaken by exhaustion. The walk must have been longer than I realized. All that time in the sun must have made me hazy. Sunsick, my father used to call it when I was a child, exhausted after days at the Beach.

“I’m floating so high,” I eventually say, sounding labored.

She pats my knee, expecting that would be the case. I think I hear her say, “I know, dear,” but I fall asleep on the examination table before I can understand that it’s happening. These are the results we’ve been waiting for.

*

It’s going to be my last day at the river, I can feel it as I slide the cold stones into my mouth. I tie my robe and shuffle out to the kitchen where my husband is scowling at the newspaper. So furious at something that he’s gripping the paper with tense fists, pulling the ends so strongly that I think he’ll tear it right apart. I want to ask him what’s wrong, but I know it would be garbled and unintelligible with the stones. Instead, I walk over to him and run my fingers through his hair.

“It’s those damn mines,” he says. “People are dying and they’re shipping more and more boys to the mines like there’s nothing wrong.”

He’s thinking of our boys, handsome and lithe like their father, descending into the earth with masks on their faces and yellow helmets pressed against their skulls. Thinking of them covered in dust and whatever else, knowing they’d die like the rest of them. But our boys are so far away at university—they’ll never know a mine in their life. He seems outraged just for the sake of it.

I cannot stay to comfort him, I have to go to the river and I know nothing I would say would calm him. Instead, I kiss his forehead, fighting to keep all the stones contained in my mouth. I can feel his whole body soften. He loosens his grip on the paper, folds it, and sets it down on the table. He takes my hand in his.

“I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. He kisses my hand.

“Going to the river?” He asks, looking up at me for the first time since I’ve started all this. He sees my mouth, swelled with stones. My robe, tied around what’s left of my waist. I am so small and deranged. In this moment I realize he has known the whole time, and yet he looks at me like he always has—like I will always come home with peaches. Like I will always salt the Yolks.

I nod.

He looks down and nods, too.

“I’ll miss you,” he says.

And I squeeze his hand because I’ll miss him, too.

*

In the water, I bend my knees and fight the impulse to fall forward and drown myself. Instead, I lean back just as I have every day for the past two weeks and let the water wash over me. It doesn’t take long until I am out of the river, hovering above it with my arms spread as if I were still submerged. At first, I am only a foot above the surface, but then it starts. I begin floating higher and higher, and I can feel the sun warm my skin and dry my hair as I approach it. It happens so fast; in no time, I’m dried out like a bone. I turn my head and look down at my tree, so beautiful and full of leaves. I can see a white spot at its base, and I begin to cry at the thought of my robe never to be collected and worn again to the market.

I reach a height where I can see the whole town. My house, the market, and the store, my doctor’s hut. I can see my husband in our front yard. He’s shearing the pink, cottony growth from the pine tree. It will only grow back thicker; I should have told him so. The sun burns the hair off my face, and my nostrils sting with the smell. My skin will burst if I float any higher, I’m sure of it.

Suddenly, all below me is too small to discern. I cannot see my tree from the countryside. My house becomes one of the many white lines carved into green earth. Panic sets in as mine is the only human life I can see. I try to cry out—the sound, of course, is dulled by the stones.

My heart rate slows as I rise, and I find myself resigning. I am no longer writhing beneath the heat of the sun. I am still as a plank, and I think to myself, the sky is so beautiful from the inside. The air is thin, and I can no longer breathe. My whole body is throbbing, and I am blinded by the sun. Without warning, everything is warm and black.