short fiction · 2026-10-29

What the Water Knows

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The river does not mourn the fish it carries downstream, nor the leaf, nor the ash of the burned letter. It holds each thing in its cold grip a moment — the fish's last thrash, the leaf's slow surrender, the ink bleeding its secret into current — then releases. The hydrogen bonds do not distinguish between grief and glucose, between a mother's tears and rain. They arrange, they hold, they let go. The water remembers only physics: how to be liquid, how to rise, how to fall. We are the ones who call it memory.