7 Liora and the Current of Almost IV: Final disturbance

And in that remaining, the distinction she had once felt—between what might be grasped and what must be let pass—no longer quite held.

There was only the current.

And the way it almost became.

—

Later—though she could not say when—Liora tried to recall the first time she had come to the shallows.

She remembered the pale stones.

The stillness.

The sense that there had been nothing to see.

But something in the memory resisted.

Not a detail, but the order of it.

It no longer seemed clear that the stillness had come first.

Or that the current had been something she noticed.

It was equally possible—no, not possible, but present—that the movement had always been there, and that what she had taken for stillness was only the absence of her noticing it.

Or—

that the current itself had only begun when she first felt it.

She stood at the edge of the water again, uncertain now not of what was there, but of how “there” had ever been.

The shallows lay before her as they always had.

Clear.

Pale.

Unmoving.

Then—

not passing, not appearing—

but as if the moment of looking had once again thickened—

something like a beginning.

—

She did not step forward.

And yet, the current was there.

Or—

—