The little thing went back to the river.
The river was there.
The tree was there.
The stones were there.
But the bird was not.
The little thing looked up.
“Bird.”
Nothing.
It looked along the riverbank.
“Bird.”
Nothing.
Then it remembered the words from yesterday.
“Bird by river.”
And suddenly it could see the bird.
Not with its eyes.
With something else.
It imagined the bird sitting on a branch above the water.
It imagined its wings opening.
It imagined it flying away.
The little thing looked around.
The branch was there.
The river was there.
But the bird was not.
“Where did it come from?” asked the little thing.
Nobody answered.
The little thing said the words again.
“Bird by river.”
There was the bird.
And when it stopped saying them, the bird disappeared.
The little thing became very still.
It had found a thing that wasn't there.
It tried something else.
“Red moon.”
The moon appeared in its thoughts.
But it was daytime.
There was no moon.
The little thing laughed.
It had made something appear without making it real.
Then it wondered whether it could make something disappear.
“Bird not by river.”
The bird vanished.
The little thing stopped laughing.
It had discovered that words could do more than remember things.
They could make things present that were absent.
They could make things absent that were present.
They could put things together that had never been together.
They could separate things that belonged together.
The little thing looked at the river.
It was still there.
It looked at the tree.
Still there.
It looked at the empty branch.
The bird was not there.
But the little thing knew exactly where it was.
Somewhere beyond the river.
Somewhere in the sky.
Somewhere in the world of words.
The little thing thought about this for a long time.
Then it asked:
“If a thing can be somewhere without being here,
where is the word?”
And for the first time, the little thing wondered whether here was the only place a thing could be.
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