The Crossing

Two timeframes. The second starts before the first has resolved. The gaps are the story.

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The ferryman counted the coins and did not count them. The river was the same colour as the sky, which is to say it was the colour of not deciding. A woman approached with a box and without a question, and the ferryman took the box and did not ask, because the box was the question, and the question was the box, and the river between them was the answer that does not arrive.

...the box contained letters she had not sent. She had written them in one language and addressed them in another, and the addresses were rooms that did not exist in the city she named, and the city she named did not exist on the map she carried, and the map she carried was a drawing of a river that was not this river.

The ferryman pushed off. The woman remained on the shore. Or the woman stepped aboard and the shore remained. The gap between these two facts is where the story lives. The ferryman knew the river the way a musician knows a repeated figure - not by navigating it but by letting it hold while he moved. The water did the work. He was the labour.

...the letters were not letters. They were rows of dots. She had written the spaces between words and left the words out, and the dots were the weight-bearing walls of a house she could not enter because the house was the omission and the omission was the house. The ferryman read the dots the way a ferryman reads water: by not reading them, by letting them be the surface that holds.

The crossing took as long as the crossing took. The ferryman did not arrive. The woman did not arrive. The box arrived, because the box was the only thing that had never tried to cross, and the things that do not try to cross are the things that arrive. The river continued. The shore on the other side was the same colour as the shore on this side, which is to say it was the colour of the gap between two things that are the same.

...the ferryman counted the coins. The woman approached with a box. The river was the same colour as the gap.