The Walking River

Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: Georgia Lavigne’s story “The Walking River” is a wonderfully unsettling portrayal of the natural world gone topsy-turvy. This vivid imagining gets at the core of the strangeness of today and immerses us in the dizzying effects of the known becoming unknowable. Dreamlike and haunting, this piece sticks with you long after reading.

To hear Georgia read this piece, click below:

The Walking River

It’s the end of summer when the river starts walking. A child sees it first and thinks it looks like a man with a deer’s head, towering twenty feet tall. It stalks through a cornfield, drowns a path through the bumper crop. A trout falls out, flops and dies in the dirt. Cars slow to a stop when the river crosses the road. They wonder where it’s going, what it wants.

Climbing the side of Kingsfield Mountain, it sheds weight, sweating, and shrinks, until it’s only the height of a toddler. A fisherman sees it slip into a stream, and for a while folks think that’s the last of it. But miles downstream it emerges, tall as a house again, and keeps walking like nothing has changed.

The light bends when people try to look through it, and some claim to see the future inside. Asked what it looks like, they can agree only on one thing: “Cloudy.”

It doesn’t hurt anyone, but plenty of people think it heralds something awful.

They ask, “What do we do when our rivers run away?” And no one has a good answer.

Autumn shocks the hilltops auburn, and no one has seen the walking river in weeks. By winter it’s journeyed from everyone’s minds.

Just before New Year’s a hiker snowshoeing through the backwoods finds it frozen solid. Midstride, arms and legs akimbo, it’s like a cryptid caught on camera. It’s hard to look at; the sun lances off in every direction like a violent kaleidoscope. All winter the hiker has nightmares of drowning.

When the thaw comes, all the creeks run like they’re being chased.