All Rivers Flow to the Sea Read Free

bookcase, organized alphabetically.
    “Rose.”
    “Mmm?”
    This must be what it feels like to be a mother, with Jimmy my child and me trying to get dinner on the table while he shoves himself against my legs and whines.
    He doesn’t say anything.
    I can’t fit my history book in. It’s too tall for the tiny perfect bookcase I’m making out of the top shelf of my locker. It almost fits, but it doesn’t. Shove. Get in there, book, you book of wars with your World War I and your World War II and your Korean War and your Vietnam War and your Gulf War and your one after another war and war and war.
    What is the matter with these people, these people who won’t stop fighting, won’t stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girl’s brain, a girl named Ivy.
    Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul.
    A light blue truck will come sliding toward you without you ever wanting it to, and isn’t that enough hurt right there? Isn’t that enough? The rivers within me are rising again, flooding over their banks. There is too much inside me, too much to be contained. Get in there, book of wars. Get in there. Stay in there.
Shove.
    Its spine breaks.
    “Shit!”
    I turn to Jimmy.
    “Did you see that?” I say. “I broke the goddamned book.”
    He’s silent. The same look is in his eyes as the day before, when he lay on that huge flat rock looking up at me, and said, “Rose?” Then he turns away.
    Wait, Jimmy,
I want to say, but I don’t.
    Wait, little butterfly, flapping your wings in your Amazon rain forest. Please wait. But, too late. The butterfly has flapped his wings and knows not what he has done. Too late, little guy. Too late. Consequences cannot be counted on. That boy behind the wheel of that light blue truck went a little bit fast around that curve, and now a girl who just wants to hear her sister say,
Come on, Rosie — let’s walk,
can’t. Did those men in my book of wars, those men flying over Hiroshima, have any idea what would happen? Could they ever have imagined what would result when they pushed that button? And when they flew away from what they had done, from what they now could see was happening back there on the ground so far below them, did they feel like me?

People stare.
    Rose-whose-sister-was-in-the-accident. Rose-who-slept-with-Jimmy-Wilson-up-at-the-gorge-did-you-hear?
    Rose the freak show.
    The corridor swirls with color and sound and motion. I close my eyes and lean against one of the lockers that lines the walls. Feel the hard cool metal. Press into it.
    “My mom said she’s going to be like that forever. There’s no hope.”
    “Will she end up in a wheelchair?”
    “A wheelchair? Are you kidding? She can’t even move. She can’t eat. She can’t even breathe.”
    “She can’t
breathe?
”
    “Not without a ventilator. She’s a human vegetable. She can’t even open her
eyes,
man. She’s done for, but they wouldn’t pull the plug. That’s what my mom said.”
    The un-bell rings again. That hideous sound that is nothing like a bell is let loose upon the world to do its damage.
Get used to it. War is noisy, Rosie. Open your eyes, Rose. Open your eyes and follow the voices. Around the corner. There.
    “She can open her eyes,” I say.
    They turn to me. Tracy Benova has a stack of books in one hand. Digging into her locker for her jacket with the other. Todd Forrest with his narrow blue eyes looks away,