The River’s Bruised Mouth

A tale of water and wanting

Ani Eldritch
Lit Up
Published in
3 min readJan 12, 2025

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This digital artwork features a surreal landscape with bold, layered shapes forming a flowing river that extends beyond a framed canvas into the surrounding space. The color palette blends deep blues, reds, and oranges, evoking a futuristic sunset. Smooth, curving lines create a sense of movement, while floating geometric platforms enhance the three-dimensional illusion, merging abstraction with dreamlike scenery.
Artwork created by the author using ChatGPT.

The river rose and fell in her throat, thick as night, drowning her screams before they could be born. Cold water licked the inside of her lungs, her ribs a cage too fragile to keep her safe. The moon, half a mouth in the sky, gaped down, silent and useless.

“Not yet,” he had said, and she had believed him.

A house with a green door, peeled like an old wound, stood at the top of the hill, looking down on the river like a disapproving mother. She had come here once before, or perhaps she had always been coming here, stepping backwards through time, her footprints swallowed by the mud. She was fifteen when she first saw him, standing where the water lapped at the roots of the weeping willow.

“You should be careful,” he had said. “The river has a taste for girls like you.”

The morning they pulled her out, the wind smelled of salt and rotting leaves. She was still breathing. A disappointment.

She had loved him once, or thought she had, in the way a shadow loves its maker — clinging, stretching, shrinking, always at the mercy of the light. He had touched her with hands made of bone, heavy and hollow, pressing into her skin like a signature. She had let him write his name across her body, believing it meant forever.

“I don’t think I love you,” he had said, one evening when the sky bruised purple.

She had nodded, as if it were a fact of nature, a shift in the tide, something to be expected.

The river carried her secrets in its belly, rolling them smooth as stones. She had given it so many, whispered into its open mouth, let it drink from her palms. She had trusted it to keep them, but rivers are greedy things.

“Tell me you want me,” she had said once, voice small as a minnow.

He had smiled. “What does it matter?”

When she was little, her mother had warned her of the water. “It takes more than it gives,” she had said, wringing her hands as if she could squeeze her fears out like dishwater. But mothers cannot save their daughters from drowning in things other than rivers.

The house with the green door stood empty now, its windows cataract-blind, staring at nothing. She walked past it, her breath thin as smoke, the weight of memory pressing into her like a second body. She did not knock.

“You always come back,” he had said once, laughing, his teeth bright as polished stones.

Not this time.

The river was full that night, fat with rain, its belly swollen and restless. She stood at the edge, bare feet sinking into the mud, the cold licking up her calves. The wind smelled like endings.

“If I walked in,” she had asked him, once, “would you pull me out?”

His eyes had been dark then, unreadable. “Would you want me to?”

She had wanted him to want her enough to stop her. She had wanted him to ache, to feel the pull of her absence like a phantom limb. She had wanted him to drown in her the way she had drowned in him.

The water curled around her ankles, familiar as breath. She could almost hear it whispering her name, calling her home.

But she did not step in.

The house with the green door stood silent behind her, the river open-mouthed before her, but she turned away from both. She walked back up the hill, the night swallowing her whole. The river did not follow.

She did not look back.

© Ani Eldritch, 2025.

Thanks to Peculiar Julia for editing and Lit Up for hosting my work.

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Published in Lit Up

Welcome to Lit Up -The Land of Little Tales. Here you can read and submit short stories, flash fiction, poetry - in brief, your own legend. We're starting little. But that's how all big stories begin.

Ani Eldritch
Ani Eldritch

Written by Ani Eldritch

I’m a writer and poet from NYC.

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