I do not always swallow the people who walk into me.
Some yearn for my embrace, the oily velvet and weedy tangles of my maelstrom, the ever-rolling stream of Time that bears everyone away.
They stride with purpose, weighed with stones to take them deep, stop them breathing, prevent them surfacing, ensure they never have to face again the cruel dry challenges of day.
Others blunder in by mistake, reeling with drink, tripping and hiccupping, with no desire to end their days, no intent to gulp and swallow and gurgle and go to sleep for ever in my black and wet oblivion.
Often I oblige and let them drown. But if I judge they are not ready, if I don’t desire them in my bed, if I don’t want their bodies to bloat and putrefy and pollute my precious waters, nibbled by fish and rats or pecked by ducks, I wash them ashore, strand them on weirs, or snag them on my banks and branches.
Sometimes I do that for their good, sometimes for mine. Like a mouth that spits, a stomach that vomits, what is wrong to digest.
A UK-French national, D X Lewis has worked as a correspondent for Reuters and a writer on AIDS for WHO. He now writes fiction and works for the stage from Ferney-Voltaire, near France’s border with Switzerland. His novella-in-flash, A Life in Pieces, was published in February and is available on Amazon.
This story was shortlisted in the April 24 Monthly Micro Competition.