And perhaps that is all there is to say about my kind in your human eyes.
Which brings me back…
It must be strange for you to hear my ramblings, or even to fathom the idea that a pebble could have something worth talking about, and, to be honest, I can’t blame you either for I, too, had forgotten that I had a voice, for far too long believed I would never once again feel the breeze and the air sliding cold and silver over my skin, or that I would ever again shine under the April sun after all this time.
For a century, give or take the handful of years your kind likes to fumble with, I had lain in the depth where the sun’s fingers never reached and where the light suffocated and drowned long before touching the silt, where every sound that arrived from above softened, folded as it was stripped of its purpose, its violence, and its shove. It softened against the pressure of the deepening waters, curled into silence under its heavy weight so it could learn to wait. And only then, reborn, reshaped, and remade, it rose back again to the surface as it merged with the river’s voice as the current moved the water along its bed. Nothing reached her and thus remained unchanged: not thought, not cry, not call Everything bent to the river’s will. Everything broke. Everything small came undone in the dark where the water kept its hold, where the cold made even memory feel ancient and old for you folk to still sing the tales of the monster the river hides in its womb.
One thing the river never changes though, is the truth, and in its own time, the water will wash away the lies humans have woven on its shore, signs and witnesses will be sent back to the surface only for those with eyes ready to see and ears ready to hear.
You probably are afraid now too, since the river is drying, so she must be hungry for your men’s blood. She who left a trail of bodies floating above the water after she drained them and took her fill. But you should be afraid of little old me, because I am the one sent with the truth that had been waiting for years to be spit back in your face, the same way you chewed up a woman and spit her by the riverside from where you baptized the monster skin you then chose to shroud her dead body in, once upon a time.
I alone remember the truth.
A pebble too plain to be collected, too small to be whispered about, but too durable to forget.
The place I have called a home, the river that had taken me in and gave me back anew when the riverbed slowly dried of water year after the other by your kind’s doing, is the same place where your parents warned you, and now you in turn warn your children, not to wander when the sun has slipped away at night. Behave, you say, or she will rise from the river. Her name is gone now, washed thin by your cheap tales, pretty titles you fashioned out of terror and ignorance. Names of witches and sirens and monsters you chose for her.
A woman is born with nothing, not even a name, and dies with even less when men decide the sound of her life should be rewritten into something that rhymes with blame. The same mouths that bestowed it upon her can easily take it back, muddy it under their shoes, letters barely holding on for dear life as they strip them apart to shape something uglier that keeps on moving from mouth to mouth until no trace of its origin remains. When her body is no longer fit for their hands to disfigure, they will let the flesh of their tongue do the work to bend her existence to their will again.
She will walk the banks when the moon hangs full and unashamed in the sky, you say. She will come with her mangled feet and monstrous face, and she will drag you back into the water if you’re not a good boy. She hates little girls and loves to hoard men like a dragon coming to collect his gold. Do you want to be the next doll on the shelf of that insatiable whore, young boy?
But now that I have risen, I will tell the truth you refused to give her: she was never a monster. You made her one.
So let me, then. Let a pebble be your historian, for truth needs only something small and unremarkable to anchor itself to.
She loved once.
This is where your stories always grow quiet,
for love makes monsters inconvenient.
She loved a man who went to a war that swallowed boys by the thousands, a war that skinned the earth and left bones in its wake. He promised he would come back to her in spring, when the river thawed and the reeds brushed the sky like prayer-feathers.
He never did.
Word arrived that he had died with mud in his mouth, trampled by boots that gleamed too bright under a foreign sun. Those same boots soon marched into her village, bold as hunger, gleaming like teeth.
They took what they wanted.
They took who they wanted.
And what is a woman if not something to be taken, in the minds of men who believe land and bodies exist only to be claimed?
It is strange, don’t you think? That in times when the land dries up, cracked and bare, and the sun scorches the soil until it bleeds dust, only a woman’s womb is left for the conquering, left as barren as the fields, left as open as the mouths of men who have nothing else to bend to their will. When the earth gave no fruit, no seed, no life reaped by their hands, they turned to her, to the soft and yielding body, and forced what the land refused to give. They proved to themselves that they could still reap, still take, still conquer, whether it grew from soil or sprang from flesh, for what is a man if not a plunderer of what is offered and what is not, and what is a woman if not the land he can tame?
But she fought.
That is the truth you drowned.
She fought like the river fights the dam, like the land fights drought, like a heartbeat fights for life.
The first man found dead in the river had worn the same bright uniform a little girl saw looming over her the night before, as those men, with their too bright skins and too bright eyes molded into incarnations of the devil, colonized bodies after they won over the land.
They say she lured those men.
No.
They followed her.
Men always follow beauty, to worship it, to ruin it, to claim it, to punish it for shining too bright.
They saw her stepping from the river at night, her clothes clinging like second skin, her hair slicked dark as obsidian, the moon polishing her shoulders with silver, and they labeled their lust as an invitation. They mistook their greed for her enchantment.
When they reached for her, she reached for the river.
The river answers women like her.
Always has.
Always will.
Each man taken by the current was a man who had taken first. Taken a body, taken a village, taken a continent in his hunger.
But when your daughters whispered to each other of nights too dark to speak of,
when their eyes grew older than their faces,
when their brothers never returned from fields or forests or foreign fronts,
you needed an enemy that was not yourselves.
And so you remade her.
Not as a grieving lover.
Not as a warrior who fought the only way she could.
Not as a woman wronged beyond measure.
No, as a seductress, a temptress, a moonlit monster who devoured men simply because she could.
It was easier that way. Cleaner. More palatable for bedtime warnings and moneyed boys who should never learn that a woman’s body isn’t theirs for the claim.
And now the only truth left of her is the truth I carry, polished smooth by years in the river’s throat, small enough to fit in a brave woman’s palm.
For she did not go empty-handed.
On that last evening, moon swollen, sky bruised, she bent down by the bank where the mud had cooled and the meadow wildflowers whispered like mourners. She reached for me. Me. A pebble too small for legend, too plain for myth, too stubborn to forget. Her fingers closed around me with a tenderness I had never known, as if warmth itself could be woven from skin, as if she could stitch her last strength into my grain. We both knew what it felt like to be crushed, after all; to be unnamed and stepped on, I, one of too many pebbles on a gravel path, all the same, and she, buried in the footnotes of history with not even an elegy to her lost name. So it was rather fateful that under that moonlit night we had found one another, she and I.
She held me tight the way a frightened girl once clutched her blanket in the cold, the same girl you later painted into a monster so wild and bold. You took her voice, her name, her story, her face. You carved terror into the space where her truth had been.
You took too much from her, far more than any river ever did.
When she stepped into the water, she did not tremble.
But her hand around me did.
The river rose to meet her, not as a beast, not as a curse, but as an old friend opening its arms, a mother reclaiming what the world had devoured. She did not drown. She returned. Returned to the only place that had never asked her to smile, never asked her to bleed, never asked her to kneel. The river took her, yes, but only because you had taken everything else.
And as she slipped beneath the dark, she pressed me once more into her palm,
tight, warm, certain, as if giving me a task older than grief, sharper than memory, heavier than stone:
Remember me.
Carry what they bury.
Tell the truth when I cannot.
So here I am.
Small enough to go unnoticed under your foot, but heavy enough to tip the scale of every lie you ever told.
I alone remember her right.
And now, whether you like it or not, so will you.
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