At the corner, past a bend in the road of close and leaning elms and a little before the electrical station, there is a whitish two-storey house whose view of the river is blocked by a green concrete fourplex. Before the apartment was built, a person standing on the front step could look out past what was a young and spindly tree toward a swath of wild grasses that reached for the river.

From the house, the bank with its tangle of bushes and the papers that blew down and snared in them, was out of sight. Grass met the swirling back of the river and the water’s movement was catching. The steps were adrift, the house slid with the current, and only the far bank—white with snow, orange in fall, green in spring—anchored the scene. A come-and-go sand bar gestured forward into the river, tapering to point downstream.

It could not have been this spot, exactly, where Marguerite’s father’s cart once tipped. The river courses deeply in its middle, out front of the sandbars, and Marguerite always told the story as “by the ford,” a shallow crossing. So it could not be this exact place in the river where her story belonged — but as the house settled and the river coursed past, Phidelma, who’d heard the story enough times, felt water on the boards at her feet.

*

“The Secret”

The ground is damp. The hole less than two feet deep. Water will soak quickly through the cloth, bleed the ink which has held her words so long. In a day it will soak through in ten years it will be gone. This is what she is imagining, anyways. That a secret cannot hide in the ground forever. That is not the point this time. She brushes dirt off from her hands then moves into the light to wipe her fingers on a clump of grass. It has grown up from a mound of dirt in the yard and, the way it is getting blown around, it looks like it is reaching around for her hand. Reaching up for her. Her hands burn cold. She draws her fingers through the grass and even though there is no one to hear her the ground feels alive and so she whispers, ‘And this time the pages are seeds.’

[3/5 Very good descriptions, Jody. Watch for sentence fragments. ‘Which’ requires comma use. Dialogue should be set apart with “double quotation marks”. The idea of ‘suspense’ comes through well, who will dig this ‘secret’ up?]

*

The house has stood through many changes. There is the boxy apartment beside it now, and beyond that the grasses are tame and river parkway well lit, with an asphalt bike and jogging trail. The little elms have grown tall and their branches arch over the street. Their roots work into clay water pipes, and need annual routing. They buckle the sidewalk, and the cement has heaved, and broken, and been re-poured time and again. The City tends the trees, trimming deadwood, but they are aging and branches have twice fallen on the front eave of the house in storms. The neighbourhood fights an uphill battle to keep picket fences white. Most of the landlords have switched to posts and chain-link, which sag once they’ve been kicked in or climbed over. Gangs claim open space. There is a spray-paint tag marking each back lane. There is a tag on the weathered garage behind the house but it is difficult to make out the letters. They are royal blue, three indecipherables crammed together in a stamp that looks vaguely Arabic. A foreign creature drawn to the white board siding—unexpectedly caught, pressed, and pinned.