The cold may have had something to do with it. On the last day of summer, I walked up to the river around four in the afternoon and decided to go in. It was the warmest hour. My head was full of the most delirious clouds, and the sun had already begun to pull back the day so that the light delicately tracing the riverbank was completely unreliable, its relationship to time still being decided. The changing of seasons here is like an illness, it scatters all reason. I let out a painful sneeze, half-echoed in the open air; no one else was at the river that day; the banks were busy with inhuman life. My senses were usually drawn to and consumed by other people, watching them squabble, listening to their small gossip, which left no attention for any other phenomenon, but in the absence of others, I began to watch the river. Where the water passed over several flat angular stones, it expressed a white edge. A buckthorn dropped black fruit into the water. A bat flew above the river, skimming for insects, and then dove for a sip of water. It made several circles in the air before flying off toward the train tracks, which crossed the river farther down. I hadn’t thought about any of these figures for a long time, the water, the sun, the buckthorn, the bat, the place where the water came from and the place that it went, and on the little trail up to the river, I saw other reminders of these things I hadn’t properly thought about in a while, such as the exposed roots of a tree I couldn’t name. But I felt no remorse—what did they have to do with me?

I put my left foot in. The water-green, ochre, mustard, gray, and mauve waters under the influence of September light folded over the river—wasn’t quite autumn cold. Were cold baths a cure for colds, or warm ones? I couldn’t remember the folk wisdom, or my mom’s advice. Stay warm and dry, the water seemed to say, while everything else was silent. I was in a rebellious mood. Why not go all the way in? I thought, but I couldn’t hold onto that thought for very long, or any other: they streamed away, sluggish and mollusk-like, soft, dim, rolling carpets of thought, flowing from the water’s colors to the work I was missing this week being out sick and then back to the river, to a young duck screaming out of the grass on the bank, grass so long it dragged in the current. I put my other foot in. The rocks were furry and gross; a bright green glob, broken off from the bottom, floated on the surface like a frog’s heart. I blinked; the sun’s reflection was too bright and active, piercing with its constant movement on the water. I slipped and fell in, already aware of the blood leaking from the gash in my palm. Ah—by a trick of weary light!

My head went underwater and I heard the suffering voices of dinosaurs. What else could they have been, those soaring, creaking, inexplicable voices in whose syllables I could taste the red starry violence of a meteor? Things have been put into motion. Things can’t be undone. They cried out after years of conquering each other. What was lost with them? What did they take with them into the sand? So much, and yet my cells drew a membrane around all the feats they had accomplished. Water poured into my ears, quieting everything down to a muffle. I struggled to find the air, any oxygen at all, and it seemed not to exist, as if the air and the sea were mixed into each other as they had never been on this planet. Water filled me like smoke and abolished every thought of my cold. I forgot what I had been doing, why I had come, and even where I was, which city, which state. The delirious clouds’ vapor trailed into infinity...

I finally managed to separate water from air from earth and took a breath, rising out of the river. And there was already someone there, a blue-faced man with an enormous belly, though the rest of his body was proportional to itself, skinny even. He was two men pressed together, and when he stood up, the lifting of his belly out of the water caused a small whirlpool to form. He looked as if he were about to speak and then silently handed me the shaft of a broken spear. The blade was long gone. The handle was wrapped in worn leather. He seemed proud of me for having taken it from him, which was also the exact moment I became unsure that I should have taken it. I blushed, bewildered. Even though he was physically repulsive, I wanted to entangle myself with him, with the two bodies he appeared to offer, using one for pleasure and the other to break some unspeakable taboo. I wanted him to abuse me, to reduce me to insignificant molecules, to puddles of mud and algae, fragments of that original bed of lowly wonders that rose to blue jays and missile defense systems and sequoias, that rose to everything around us. Either there was another man in the river, one who had held his breath the whole time I had been on the bank, and my desire now gathered in him, or he was the gathering itself, the work of my body and my mind, of chemicals and currents, some small inner pulse enlarged and made material. I wouldn’t be able to change this—the desire, I realized, was lodged in me, and while I could forestall its fulfillment, I couldn’t do anything about its origin: it would stay with me, like so many other things I can’t talk about.

Kyle E. Miller can usually be found wandering Michigan’s forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches college writing. His writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and Propagule, and he won first place in poetry at Poetic Visions of Mackinac 2022 and again in 2024.