The Bones of the Drowned
If you go out onto the bridge that looks down from our town over the neighboring hills, and you walk there, slowly, with a slight lilt in your walk as though you have no particular place to go that day, and if you allow your heels to click on the surface of the bridge, and stop for a moment to look down at the ripples of fish swimming beneath the crystal waters, you will see an intimation of the great secret that has haunted our town since its first days. Down there, underneath the rocks and the gaily waving algae, you will fancy that the fish are swimming over the contours of a woman’s face. For a moment you will stop, your breath catching in your throat, and you will tell yourself that it is just a trick of the light, and will marvel at the way in which the sun and the shadows can come so easily to create the illusion of a face where there is none. But then, if you are patient in your study, you will see her blink, and will see that there is something stirring beneath the sand that lies in the riverbed, as though hands were struggling to claw up the river’s bottom, as though the woman’s face was struggling to pry the clogging mud out of its mouth, and to clear the weeds out of her eyes. The sense of someone buried alive will overcome you, and you will look away.
Perhaps you will walk off, then, telling yourself that you saw nothing except a shadow writhing across the bottom of a river. But you will know, and your heart will not allow you to leave behind that sight. She will come and haunt your dreams, and eventually you will come here, to our river, with a spade, like a thief in the middle of the night, to dig down in the weeds and the mud, like a madman, to disturb the hatching places of buried fish eggs, and to discover, God forbid, the bones of a murdered girl. But you will not find them, though you will dig like one possessed. For the face in the depths is your own face, and the bones that you are searching for will not be yellowed for a long time. And you will not be the first that the river has pulled down into her bosom, the first to be sucked and held in the mud, searching for a mystery that can only be answered when the weeds and the fishes come to fill your throat.
