Fortnightly Writing Competition: RIVER (Deadline August 28)

[Baron]

We're all familiar with plot twists and meandering plots. Does your story flow? Does it branch? Is there danger and excitement, a sense of wonder, or placid tranquility that tickles the soul? This fortnight, I invite you to write a story on the theme of ...

RIVER


The theme is flexible - any stream that flows will do. I can even open it up to the liquid nitrogen flows of ice worlds or the atmospheric rivers that bring nothing but rain right when you don't need it. Artificial or natural, industrial or pristine, channeled or free, raging or calm - rivers form a backdrop to our lives, but also run through the heart of them. Vacations, transportation, romantic venues, water source, obstacles, flood threats, habitats, drowning hazards, recreation ... rivers are infinitely flexible plot elements. The metaphoric flow of a river also mirrors that of storytelling, starting at the beginning and wending its way towards some sort of conclusion. Will your story drift like Huckleberry Finn's raft through childhood adventure or tumble tragically over a waterfall like Roland Joffé's Jesuit missionary?

Deadline is August 28, 2025 at midnight Hawaii time. No word limit. Good luck to all participants.

[Sinitrena]

Oh, this topic has some ideas flowing already, let's see where my mind swims!

[Mandle]

                    Bear Teeth

Spoiler

      Mind focused on her daughter's death, Yasuko Ue sat at the table grinder, sparks zipping off her plastic face shield, preparing for revenge.  Her little Asuko had been found by the riverside, ripped apart, and the beast would be back.  It was a seasonal animal.  It reappeared at that exact place every year.  Her eyes narrowed as she pushed the weapon harder against the wheel, the flying sparks growing white hot, matching her rage.

      When her daughter went out of the house that morning, Yasuko shouted her the usual 'Take care!' and heard back 'You, too, mom!' and then the door between them closed forever. 
      Not hearing Asuko come back after school didn't worry her that much.  But as she put the broccoli in the pot, she glanced up and saw that the neighborhood had grown orangely dark, shadows from houses reaching up the walls of others.  Around eight, she started messaging Asuko's friends, asking if they were with her.  None were.  Notifications from the friends' parents started popping up on her phone, the broccoli now limp and abandoned in the cold pot.  They were asking stupid shit like 'She didn't come home?' and 'Have you seen her?'
      Then one message jumped up, saying, "My daughter said she saw Asuko going into the woods."
      Fuck, she thought, dread pouring concrete into her stomach, replacing her flighty panic.  Then police it is.

      And police it was.  And then townsfolk, and even people from away, once the news broke on national TV.  And then the Japanese Self Defense Force.  There were search parties scouring the mountains for days, JSDF choppers bending pine tops over in their downwash, all around the sleepy little mountain village that had been slammed into the spotlight. 

      Then they'd found her, found her torn little body, thirty miles from where she'd gone off into the tree line, the sun glinting off the flowing river there in flickers across the towering rocks along its banks.

      Yasuko tilted the forward edge of the weapon around a few degrees, rounding it off, eyes darting between the diagram in the zoology book on her worktable and the work itself.  She took her foot off the pedal of the grinder, and it whirred down to a stop.  She pulled up her plastic faceguard and blew the last filings of hot iron off the end of her masterpiece.  The weapon was ready.

      It was a long drive up the winding tree-lined roads to where she knew the beast would be again.  She'd hired professionals to track it.  It came back to the riverside on this exact day every year.  She parked her car by the side of the road, much like the one Asuko had walked off of thirty miles away.  And, just like her daughter, she went into the forest.
      Unlike her daughter, Yasuko was armed.

      As she cornered the boulder, placing one hand against it, calling it 'old friend' in her mind for the last time, there was the turn of the river her daughter had died on, and there was the animal her private investigators had tracked over the last five years.
      She fell into a running crouch, the long iron pincers she had ground and bolted together up under one arm.  The beast was in a squat, shoulders twitching, a hand obviously on its crotch.  She knew the fucking thing would be masturbating into the river on this of all days.  The PIs had told her so.
     
      Kenichi Omori was about to finish when he heard feet swishing up low behind him.  He got up from his squat, trying to yank up his pants as his head exploded with shattering pain.  Then, he felt his face, half in the river flow, dragged up into the eyes of some woman.  Oh wait, yeah, he knew her eyes from the internet.

      "Ahhh," he said, shaking his bloody scalp, red droplets flying, splattering on rocks on one side and bleeding away in the river's flow on the other.  "You're her mother."  His teeth turned crimson as the blood from his wound poured down into his mouth.  "You know what..."  He looked like he was about to tell her something terrible, so she just let go of his shirt and he fell like the sack of shit he was, tumbling over, and then she was on him with her weapon.

      "You know what?!" she spat in his face, and she pulled apart the long arms of the pincer, placing the short jaws at the other end against his thigh.  "Here's THIS!"

      He screamed so wonderfully to her ears at first, as the sharp metal incisors at the end of her weapon pierced his upper leg.  Then she ripped the pincers away, opening them and dumping the chunk of flesh to one side with a splat.

      She thought she'd steeled herself for the screams, through all the years while fantasizing over this moment, but they still horrified her.  This was sacred ground, after all, so Yasuko raised the pincers over her head and brought them down squarely on the beast's forehead.  Now that he was as silent and dead as her daughter, she took her time to bite him again with the weapon, once in the side of his ribcage, tearing the chunk away there to expose white stripes, and then again at his waist, dragging out purple ropes.

      Once the scene looked convincing enough, she took out a plastic bottle from her jacket pocket and said, "Fuck you, you child-rapist piece of shit," and then, through tears, she poured the water mixed with bear saliva over his wounds and walked away, her weapon ridged with carefully researched teeth over one shoulder, feeling fulfilled and empty.

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