If I Lived in the River / John Vreeland

If I lived in the river and sat motionless among the reeds (so as not to sink or drift away downstream while I slept in the night), and if I remained long enough to become covered with moss, and roots, and seaweed streaming in the soft current, my still-pale palms turned upward waiting for some curious and unfortunate piece of flesh to pause there briefly—still pale and unmossed for the thrashing of those fish which I have captured and bitten into raw—and the entirety of me carapaced with muck (only cracked occasionally here and there for the necessity of shifting about slightly in my bed of reeds, or from bad dreams, which doubtless shall have worsened)—yes, if I led such a life as this, then I should have no opportunity to busy myself with books, and so in order to stave off boredom would need to whisper to myself a great deal of stories, one of which would of course involve a mermaid, who’d come sweeping down the river and asking why I, a terrestrial being, should have remained sitting in the river so long that I’d grown thus thickly coated with slime, for indeed she’d have noticed my legs, and brushed the slime from them, of curiosity, to reveal my pale skin, and marveled at them, having never seen such an enigmatic color except in summer when the waterlilies bloomed, and even then it was not the same color at all. In love with me therefore from the first—though perhaps more in love with my legs, which I’d begin to feel she rather envied than worshipped, for she would sometimes leave me so long to further marvel at them that I would grow lonely, and wonder if she were still there, and thrash my hand around in the water as a sign for her to surface—whereupon she would do so, but only reluctantly, and then speak with a bitter air for a brief time afterward. But there are no untroubled relationships, and I wouldn’t mind these squabbles, for I’d feel again so happy as she sat beside me in the reeds! She’d gather food for the both of us, and ask every sort of question about my childhood on land, and accuse me of ingratitude for having abandoned the dry ground. But I should tell her that there is no constant sense of motion on the land as there is in the river, but rather a horrendous stillness always, even when the tall grass sways about one in the summer; and so, desiring some partial return to the former chaos, I made my choice, and sat down, and have remained thus more or less contentedly. She would admire me constantly, my pale skin, and my stories of childhood, so different from her own, so dark and darkly-green and peopled with jaws, and characterized by a nightmarish, too-wide freedom. Doubtless such a story would end with her drowning and eating me, and returning by waterways to her native seafloor in autumn, carrying a makeshift chest of woven reeds containing my legbones, from which she would construct some extremely odd and primitive work of art—for just as, despite however long I sat in the water, I should nevertheless remain a terrestrial creature, in just the same way, no matter how many stories of earth I filled her head with, she could not but remain a cold, unyielding, aquatic thing, preferring to my warm side a dark and familiar benthos.
And then, I imagine, I should turn to other, perhaps happier stories. Or perhaps—and in fact this seems far more likely—perhaps the sensibilities of a man living in the reeds are naturally inclined toward the tragic.

John Vreeland is a writer based in the Saginaw area. He enjoys writing flash fiction pieces which are “technically non-fiction,” such as this one.