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.

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“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?]

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