Infinities

The wind's curls grew lazy and the sky rusted, and Mill and I sat overlooking the muddy river that led to both nowhere, and to the whole world.

Which way do you think we'll end up going? said Mill, I'm going to see everything that there is to see.

I didn't answer, it didn't feel right to.

Mill and I had met on the edge, at the precipice between here and hereafter. That day, we managed to drag each other away. But in the time that followed, we would often, without intention, push each other right back.

Mill was the kind of person that Gran might have called an overgrown fire – someone who was necessary and was loved beyond reason, but would, on occasion and all of a sudden, become as uncontrollable as they were unpredictable.

I looked down, tied my fingers to Mill's and asked whether there could be rivers muddier than ours out there. I said it was impossible, but Mill didn't think so and said, There must be. There has to be.

I started to imagine each blade of grass beneath us as separate and individual worlds, There must be muddier rivers there, I thought, with infinities of nowhere, forever, here, and hereafter. There has to be.

When I looked up, Mill was gone and had been for quite some time, but our fingers were still entwined somehow – reaching, somehow, through nowhere and everywhere, all at once. Whatever the case, I could still feel them against mine – impossible, necessary, burning away.

Sean Cunningham is a writer of very short prose and poetry, from Liverpool. His work has been appeared in publications such as Ellipsis Zine, Fugue, Rejection Letters, and Into the Void, among others. He can be found on Twitter: @_seanjc