Rust and Riverbone

A man confronts buried grief and dark truths in the river’s relentless current.

The creek behind Evander’s childhood trailer stank of algae, motor oil, and old rain. The first time he drowned, he was nine. His father’s calloused hand—reeking of diesel and cheap soap—shoved him under the murk.

"Stay down ‘til you stop fighting," he’d grunted. "Fear’s just air. Let it go."

Evander didn’t let go. He thrashed. Bit skin. Surfaced choking, not on water, but on the truth: his father wanted him broken.

Twenty years later, Evander drives a tow truck along Appalachia’s rain-lashed highways. He hauls wrecks—cars accordioned against guardrails, trucks swallowed by ditches festering with poison ivy. He knows the weight of broken things.

The girl appears on Route 17.

One moment: empty road. The next: she stands in his headlights, barefoot, hair snarled with river-silt, eyes like chipped flint. Her skin glistens, not with rain, but something thicker. Older.

She points east toward Blackwater Gorge.

Evander knows the stories. The mine that swallowed a town in ’72. The river turned acidic. The tricycles and wedding rings that surface after storms like rotten teeth.

"Get in," he rasps. His throat raw from silence.

Her name is Silas. Not a girl’s name. She writes it in the fog on the window.

Why are you here? he doesn’t ask.

He drives. Past the Pentecostal church’s bleeding REPENT sign. Past the trailer where his father’s ghost still spits into a coffee can. Past the cairn for men buried alive in the gorge.

Silas watches. Her silence isn’t empty. It’s loaded.

They find the Cadillac at dawn.

Sunk to its axles in the riverbank. Windows shattered. Inside: a moldering car seat. A one-eyed stuffed rabbit. A wedding ring welded to the dash by rust.

Silas makes a sound—guttural, tectonic.

Evander understands now. The wreck. The lie. The grief that wouldn’t stay buried.

"They said she wandered off," Silas whispers, river water weeping from her pores. "Said the current took her. But I saw his hands. My husband’s hands. Pushing her under."

Evander’s father died in a bathtub. Drunk. Water filling his lungs.

Fear’s just air, Evander thinks, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

He never cried. Not when they pulled the body out, bloated and blue. Not when he sold the trailer for scrap.

But now—staring at this drowned woman whose shape stutters between flesh and floodwater—he feels it. The thrashing in his chest. The nine-year-old still biting.

"Why show me?"

Her fingers trail grime on the car seat. "You know how it feels. To be pushed under. To have the world call it an accident."

They dig.

Not with shovels. With hands. Evander claws at the riverbank, mud like cold grease under his nails. Silas kneels beside him, her hair not hair at all but water caught in the act of remembering.

The mud smells like rust and mushrooms. Like old wounds.

They unearth bones. Small. Curled like a question mark.

"Lily," Silas says. Rain or tears river down her face.

Evander carries the bones to the gorge’s edge.

Fear’s just air, he thinks again. But now it doesn’t sound like his father. It sounds like survival.

He doesn’t hurl them into the abyss.

He lays them in moss instead. Where ferns uncurl. Where ladybugs trace paths like tiny, persistent suns.

"She’s not yours to bury," Silas murmurs. But the silt rinses from her skin.

The sheriff finds the Cadillac. Finds the ring. Finds the husband in Ohio with a new wife, new child.

Silas watches from the pines. Her edges blurring.

"Will you stay?"

She shakes her head. "The river’s patient. It waits for truth."

He almost touches her. Almost. "What about justice?"

"Justice is a raft," she says. "Built to float. But truth—truth is the current. Cold. Relentless. It’ll drag you under... or carry you home."

Then she’s gone. Only damp earth where she stood.

Evander still hauls the wrecks. Still drives through rain and silence.

But sometimes—when the world bleeds to gray—he pulls over. Rolls down his window. Listens.

He hears it: the thrashing. Not just his own.

All the buried things. Fighting their way up.

He doesn’t pray. Doesn’t hope.

But once, when the rain sheeted silver, he saw her—Lily. Not broken, but laughing. Whole. The boy in him thrashed still.

But now, he surfaces.

He bears witness.

In a world too cruel for prayers, it isn’t love. Not exactly.

But it stays with him.

And that counts.