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The Riverbone Hymn
A woman’s song to the flooded hours
The river ran thick with the teeth of the moon, and I, barefoot and breathless, waded in with my skirt sewn of shadow and silt. The tide licked my knees like a fox at the throat of the night, and the reeds, brittle with their own hush, bent low to listen. My mother’s voice was a bell in the wind, calling me home, but the water answered first.
I was born in a house where the wallpaper wept in summer and cracked in the cold, where the floorboards moaned like old widows and the stairs ached under ghosts. My father carved his name into the back of the pantry door, each letter a wound in the wood, and my mother kept her silence in a jar by the bedside. I was raised on the bones of lullabies, the marrow of a story half-sung, half-swallowed.
Oh, but the river was a mother with no mercy, a lover with no hands to hold, a hymn without a psalm to kneel upon. It swallowed my reflection and spat it back in a hundred broken faces, none my own. I cupped the water in my palms and drank of myself, brackish and blue.
The wind curled its fingers into my hair, whispering secrets that smelled of salt and sorrow, of things lost and never quite found. In the distance, the town held its breath, lights flickering in the windows like the eyes of old gods who had long since forgotten their names. I did not pray — I only stood, the river rising like a fever against my ribs.
And when the water kissed my mouth, I did not flinch. The sky tore itself open, spilling stars like coins from a beggar’s palm, and the night, wet-lipped and wide-eyed, swallowed them all. I closed my eyes and let myself drift, not toward drowning, but toward the part of me that had always belonged to the flood.
© Ani Eldritch, 2025.
Thanks to Chrysa Stergiou and her team at Catharsis Chronicles for hosting my work.