Competition Twenty-Five Shortlisted: The River by Jean Fyfe
You look so wholesome in your verdant, late-summer suit, sun-dappled, waters tinkling and susurrating round ancient stones, scarved in creams, greens, lightest golds, hinting at your coming autumn brilliance. For now, you are benign, a place of sanctuary and secret picnics, leaping salmon and dancing dragonflies.
But I know you. I know your murderous ways.
Gradually, the filtered light will cool and sharpen as the leaves turn, swirling away in your rushing currents, rotting clumps of matter clogging your rain-bloated banks until suddenly one pitch black night every living thing will cower from your roar as the snows release the full panoply of your deadly power. Careening over ancient volcanoes, uprooting saplings, dragging hapless wildlife to their frigid deaths, your eddies will become vortices, the twinkling cadence a strangled snarl and this world will be awash again, subsumed until you find a new gap to insinuate a tiny stream, an ancient fissure. And your majestic light, foam-flecked full steel amid the charcoal and silver of gnarled and twisted nakedness sagging under winter’s icy weight. Occasionally wedged detritus will slow your path, but you will build a roiling undertow until you explode, forcing screeching wreckage through sinewy gaps, shocking the silver spray upwards over dank and slimy rocks.
Then one day we’ll gaze, blinking, into the unfamiliar watery sun and mark your sleight of hand, your svelte, silvery curves contained once more, the question mark of new birth pushing through fetid clumps of last year’s finery. The cycle will begin again.
But for now, with the sunlight on my back and the fern-scented breeze fanning my bare arms, I will perch on your banks and briefly dip my sun-warmed toes in your bracing waters, while the staccato beat of a distant woodpecker marks the passing day.
Jean lives in Gloucestershire. She recently rediscovered the creative writing bug which she has not explored since she left school “when dinosaurs roamed the earth”. Jean is absolutely delighted by this recognition in the first writing competition she has ever entered. Moral of this unlikely story? If you have even the slightest inkling that you would love to write, try it – who knows what will happen.
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I think this is a great piece of writing. Powerful use of alliteration, sibilance, personification (of the river) and metaphor to convey the agelessness of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. We are all that person on the banks of the river of life, at the mercy of everything that might happen. Thank you!