NATHAN MACKRILL
In one spot,
the river spread thin across a rock,
letting the sun boil its shallower sections.
The mist around one pool broke
when Anna reached in,
scooped out a pebble,
handed it to me; I laughed to hide my uncertainty.
‘What am I going to do with this?’
She fell silent,
dug a playful foot into the sand.
‘…Keep it?’
I wandered ahead,
hoping she would follow.
I wanted to show her my spot:
a place I’d been keeping to myself. But
further along, the rockface dropped into darker water.
I jumped from the ledge;
Anna didn’t like being splashed,
but I was already under.
Black water, eyes closed,
the current tugged at half-thigh.
I broke the surface, rubbed my eyes – checked on her.
Anna was crouched;
Perched, lowering herself.
Then she stopped.
‘I can’t see the bottom,’ she called out.
I hadn’t considered that;
in fact,
I liked it after rain, when rivers churned
with folds of silt.
I paddled further upstream,
until I rose for breath, turned around and saw Anna had
stayed on the ledge.
Clouds of bugs fluttered
when she pulled her legs from the water –
‘Can’t you just come back?’
I pointed at the spot I had promised:
a big tree on the bank further up,
and the shade beneath it.
We could lie there,
hide from the sun, watch the sky.
I’d even clear the leaves for her, check for spiders.
That made Anna look at the pool again,
billowing with silt.
‘I still don't trust what's underneath.’
I told her it was fine.
But she stayed
on the rock shelf.
After watching her for a while,
I wondered if she trusted me.
My bare back was turning red;
the muddied stream tugging at the pebble in my pocket,
I waded through the shallows,
where the riverbed was visible,
and sat beside her on the ledge.
Anna shifted away, onto a sandy patch nearby, and
scooped a hole for me to sit in.
As she did it,
she patted my pocket.
‘Where’s the pebble I gave you?’ she asked.
‘Must have fallen out.’
I offered to find her another one.
But it seemed she didn’t want that.
She glared towards the deeper water,
then down at the sand.
‘It’s probably just time to go.’
So, I stood up, and
stirred my foot in the sand of the hole she had scooped,
until it clouded up
brown.
Nathan is a psychology and creative writing student. He started writing out of boredom as a child and has committed himself to the complexities of the romance genre.
