Title: Loves You

Gender: Female

Location: Bear Creek

Waves in the Darkness
 Short story from “The Laugh of the Water Nymph” - Doug Ammons

            Stars glisten around us, silent and unmoving across the sky, as we listen to the night.  We'd heard there was a supernova in Beta Carineas, out there off the shoulder of the constellation Andromeda.  If you knew where to look you could see it flicker from night to night as the star went through its final convulsions just before it collapsed.  Out here with all the reflections and the hint of a wind, the flicker couldn't be seen, but we could sense something was happening. 

            The first ripples move past in little rocking movements, the murmurs of space in the background.  Not a sound really, but a motion deep and slow that we feel up our spines and inside us. Such an odd feeling, like some truth that we had once known but forgotten over time, and we stare outward feeling the endless years and planets and atoms, all the pinpoints of stars living and dying spread across the sky like the blood lineage of the galaxy. The waves are coming and the break will be here when the front hits - who knew how far out it was, with its deep smooth hollows flowing through the night?  It could be across the solar system for all we know, but if we've judged it right, we'll feel when it's close.  So we float out in this huge expanse, and wait. 

            There are imaginary sounds like distant waves on a beach, or the far off emptiness of a deep gorge cut into the earth's bedrock.  Sound without echo, the incessant hands of a primordial river working powerfully and distant somewhere at its bottom, lost in the darkness.  The memories of its waters tug and push us. Motionless in the void, our thoughts hang as if disconnected from their substance.  It's not really like the ocean breathing with each swell, more like the expectation of a tremendous flood, like the prophesy of a vast river pouring from the darkness in all directions and sweeping us away.

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