The River Has Roots

But no one heard them but Esther, who rose from her bed and wandered from the house; on bare feet she stepped carefully past the Professors’ roots, and stopped at what she saw there. They were utterly strange and utterly beautiful, in a way that Esther yearned towards because she didn’t understand it, the way she yearned towards horizons and untrodden secret paths in unfamiliar woods. She fought the water stealing her breath, the hands pushing her down, the grammar unravelling the order of her body. Bones jutted beneath his blackened skin like mountain peaks, twisted like serpents coiling, cracked and rumbled like a thundering sky—but settled, finally, solid and sound as good joinery.