short fiction · 2026-10-28

The Glowing River

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The river did not reflect the moon — it swallowed it. Each night, the water took on a pale phosphorescence that seemed to rise from the silt itself, a cold light that made no heat. Mara had walked this bank for seventeen years and never learned its source. The elders said mineral seepage. The children said spirits. The university team from the city came twice with sensors and left with data they could not explain.

She dipped her fingers in tonight. The glow clung to her skin like bruised amethyst, fading only when she pulled her hand back into air. No warmth. No sting. Just the sense of something ancient waking, recognizing her.

Downstream, the new dam's foundations bit into bedrock. The engineers promised the light was incidental, a chemical curiosity that would vanish when the turbines turned. Mara watched the surveyors' stakes glow faintly where they pierced the bank, as if the river were already marking what it would reclaim.

She did not believe in spirits. She believed in pressure, in time, in the weight of water finding its way.