Robert Gatewood

“I think the river be showin a person the way his mind's supposed to work... You ain't never see a river stop and think too long about nothin. It don't never twist and squirrel around what lays in its path, exceptin when the thing is too big to go rightly through it. Then it goes around. Gently. But otherwise, it just goes and keeps goin. Over and under and through all things again like there ain't no need to lay mind to it. Like it knows they's always to be there at some point. There ain't no dallying for the river, you see. No steppin back to observe. Just pure flowin and goin and never thinkin twice.”

“The only thing left to her keeping were a bloody old rag and a creased photograph of the ocean which she held pressed to the hollow of her slender throat and had thrashed for and bit hands to protect like a madwoman risen from sleep to in her unformed state between wake and dream reproach the world tenfold.”

“They watched the elk gallop and mull about like a new texture being laid, and their presence against the mountains in that high sweet grass was a trellis alive and for a moment it seemed as if the world was reinventing itself and the boy was filled with an inexplicable hope.”

“Then he turned the pebbles over in his hardened fingers, remembering the only words in the way of wisdom his father had ever given him. The land is your bones and your bones is the land. He thought about that, looking long and long into the coming night, a light snow falling hushed and calm in the dark open. Before putting his foot in the stirrup he leaned down and scattered the pebbles back onto the earth but for one nugget that he pushed into his pocket and squeezed until it was as his heart felt. Dust.”