To Stroll Along The River’s Edge

I walked over the bridge and down a steep slope which lead under the bridge. I nearly slipped down the slope into the river, but maintained my balance as I made my way to where the water met the land. I stood under the old bridge, looking up at its underbelly. I saw many stars and planets, some familiar and others completely foreign all woven into the rot iron and wood work. Yet they shone as if they were real. I looked down at the river. Directly under the middle of the bridge the river changed. On one side was a collection of watermelon sized rocks which created a gentle rapids. On the other side, the chaotic flow turned to utter calm, uniformity, and incredible stillness. I looked at my own refection; halved by the two faced stream. Looking up and down the calm side of the river, I spotted the blue heron who was still until it performed a sudden lunge. Victorious with a fish in mouth, it flew away. I began walking down the calm rivers edge.

Upon reaching a bend in the river, I saw the Satyr. He motioned me forward, and so I went. However, he did not wait for me to catch up. I walked a good many paces behind him. Around every bend in the river I though as though I would lose him; yet there he was, maintaining a slow and steady pace. The bank of the river was heavily covered doused with foliage, which made walking difficult. I brushed branch after branch away from my face. After what seemed like hours but could have only been minuets, the Satyr stopped. A clearing opened in front of him. Children were playing in the clearing near the still smooth and serene bank. I stood next to the Satyr to examine these playing children and realized that, though they appeared as the bodies of children, their faces were old and worn.

The oldest looking child gestured toward the river itself, informing the others of the rivers existence. Another of the old children dipped his foot into the river over and over, and produced fire in his out stretched palm. A third child, after watching the previous two, gestured back down the river from where I came and there appeared two doors at the edge of the clearing. Out of an open door flowed the river, while the closed door produced only tiny droplets trickling from tiny cracks. The fourth child, uninterested in the doors, looks to the water in front of him. Holding out his palms over the water, he produced a small tornado of whirling wind over the river; it stretched from his palm down to the rivers surface. A fifth child sat on the bank of the river and made a small castle out of the loamy dirt and sand. On his castle, he lit fires on the towers and dug a pool of water in the court yard. Wind swayed the earth castle from side to side and the fires flickered in the wind. The sixth child draws triangles in the loam and studies them intently. The seventh child, standing next to the sixth, scoops water in his hands and lets it fall between his fingers. As it falls it divides into smaller and smaller droplets; so small that they never again reach the river’s surface. I was fascinated at the many displays of knowledge, but the Satyr gestured me further down the rivers edge. There we encountered one more child. Whose face was worn and elderly. This child drank from the water, laid down, and a specter of himself drifted into the sky exploding into countless shades of everything imaginable: love, hate, justice, punishment, peace, war. All things were accounted for.

Standing next to the Satyr I looked up at him, yet my gaze was no met. Again, I looked forward and witnessed two more old children awaken out of the body of the recently spectered child. These two old children sauntered further down the river. We followed. As we walked, these two children become young adults. Yet, as their bodies grew in size their faces grow younger. 

One of them walked into a cave. There was a candle at the entrance. People were chained to a wall causing their backs to face the candle. We all saw these chained people watching shadows from the candle of the elderly children playing by the river. The young adult releases one of the inmates but does not leave himself. The now fetterless man walks out of the cave, vomits, rubs his eyes, and sees the river itself. The man returns down into the cave to tell the others, but they do not believe him. He sits disparagingly in the cave for some time before leaving. This time with the young adult. Together, they formed a pyramid with the loamy river soil. The base of the pyramid turned to bronze, the middle to silver, and the top to gold. Both the fetterless man and the young adult witnessed this and were pleased.

The Satyr gestured my gaze to the other young adult who had not entered the cave. He instead walked along the rivers edge examining different rocks, grains of sand, the water itself, trees, other caves, plants, and even the air. He found the triangles that had been drawn in the sand, the different old-faced children playing at their various tasks. He examined animals, towns and countries, which before I had not noticed. Cities and peoples soon appeared to me in the loamy sand and within the eddies of the river. The young adult examined all these manifestations of life. He examined the very words emitting out of people’s mouths. There was a court room drama. There was a tragic play. He inspected each and every manifestation. He flourished his hand and with the edge of it proceeded to cut, into neat little boxes, all the manifestations he studied. These boxes slowly shrank into smaller cubes. He picked up these cubes and placed them into a satchel.

The fetterless-man, the spelunking-man, and the examining-man walked from their respective tasks, waded out into the river, and sat next to one another in the water. A small island rose from where they sat. The spelunking-man looked up at the sun, his face emitted happiness; while the fetterless-man, homesick for his cave, looked to the ground. The examining-man pulled from his bag some weights and measures and began balancing his many cubes. The river then spilt in two where the three men sat. Fetterless and Spelunking on once side and Examining on the other. The Satyr and I waded out into the river, onto the island. The island continued to stretch ever forward splitting the river in two. The Satyr and I walked between the two rivers. Down this middle river path we walked past rapidly self-creating cites. These cities soon would become entropic yet brilliant empires. Day turned to night and night back into day; and trees to ash and ash to trees. The rapid movement in the sky slowed as we approach a tree larger in the middle path.