Your page4 homepage

THE RIVER

short short story

Patrick Breheny

The world ends where the river ends. You can never get to the end. Don’t try. My father reinforced this in me. The Uprivers were bad, we always fought them, no one asked why, they were just Uprivers, not us. There were worse tribes Further Up that we’d never met, and the Uprivers became so bad from fighting them, not us, because we are good. We only had the Uprivers and the Downrivers to contend with. The Downrivers were more evil, closer to the end of the river, the end of the earth.

We ate what grew naturally, and what we grew. We cooked and drank and bathed from our river. The river was the Water of Life, and the sun was the Source of Life.

I don’t think I ever would have left if the river stayed pure. It got dirty. Coming from Upriver, it had to be their fault. We defeated the Uprivers in the Great Battle, kept their women and children, and made the men bring us Further Up. But the Further Up we went the dirtier the river got. We fought other Up tribes, even forcing the Uprivers to fight for us, but we could not get past the Upper Uprivers.

I contemplated the unthinkable. I knew I would have to do that alone, sneak by the Downrivers, and go to the end of the river where the world ended. See what’s what down there.

I found out where the river goes, into a bigger water called an ocean. I know now how big the world is. Thing is---I had to go alone to do it, to get past the Downrivers, who would have noticed large movement. I’ll have to go back to visit the same way, surreptitiously.

Long story for sure, but I made it. My father is still here, the river is dirtier, the trees are going, but he and my mother and my young siblings have survived. My father does not believe what I tell him, that the world doesn’t end where the river does, that there are bigger waters, lots of them, and other lands.

Yet he is my father. He can craft an elegant bow, file a stone to a fine shaped tip for an arrow. He is one of the Old Warriors who led us to defeat the Uprivers, who are now mixing with our community. My father doesn’t know anything of what’s beyond this place, he has no symbols for his speech sounds, yet what he taught me is knowledge that can’t be written anyway, can’t be acquired from anywhere else. He taught me what he calls the Truths.

It doesn’t matter that they are inconsistent with facts, are inaccurate. It seems to me from the different types I have heard of that all the Truths are mistaken everywhere, but they are the still the Truths. Each holds to his own because they tell us who we are. If I am now a man of the world, I will always be one of the River People. Without their Truths, I could never have gone out on my own. I would not have known who I was to begin with, so who would I be when I got where I was going?

You can’t be nothing, because nothing is...nothing.