Washing Of Sorrow

• Eddy Edwards, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2022

A cool wave of water splashes across my face, in and out, over and over again, washing away the sorrow that lives within me. The sorrow that leaks out from my skin and into the once clear water I lay in, shading it a muddy grey. It infects me and all I touch, spreading so rapidly and with such intensity that I worry one day it will consume me, leaving me more an open wound than a person. I lift my hands up and over my face to shield myself from the suns bitter glare, but instead I find the strong hands of the wind taking a hold of my aching wrists and pulling me up, thrusting my head into my lap, once again submerging me in the stream. The waves pound against me, crashing and cascading together, devouring me like a hungry beast, and discarding my body in the shallow bends where the reeds grow and the frogs sleep. Leaving me there to become the legend of the girl in the stream, and eventually, long after my name has faded from the tips of everyone’s tongues, the story will shift from the girl so ridden with grief she followed the river down the stream, but to the stream that took the girl off the edge. It will twist and fold and turn to tell the tale of the stream where the children play and splash in. Where dogs fetch sticks from the trees that no longer need them. Where picnics are held and where love dies, and where the birds wake you up and sing you to sleep. The stream that runs through this clearing in the woods that sits in this hidden corner of the world, where the wisteria grows tall and free, scaling up the trees, wrapping their talons around whatever and whoever they can, intertwining themselves with the vines that seemingly start everywhere and end nowhere, and with the roots of the gentle oak trees that tower above me, curving and winding inwards, grasping for each other to form a canopy for the birds that sit and prey, waiting and watching for when I inevitably erode away and allow myself to be overcome by nature, so they can feed from my decaying corpse.