Story
Twenty seven days she stood like a ballerina; poised, firm footed in the clay-marbled mud, seeing only her reflection in the green grey water, watching as clouds creeped by sprinkling rain that dappled the waters surface like invisible stitches sewing the days together. She waited. The bees hurled themselves by in the spring heat. The dragonflies dipped their bodies against the water and waved their wings to her. The beetles barked their clicking voices in the dewy pond reeds, casting their calls along the water’s edge, picking up small bits of flotsam like black caped washer-women collecting laundry, tedious but disheveled. She lifted her head to the sun, opened, then closed, then opened her eye, composed a poem she called The Way, wherein she described the various faint and tender sounds surrounding her, namely the rhythmic beating of the small insect wings and the spiderweb-silent descent of a feather alighting on the milky glass surface of the pond, and in the final lines she wrote: Perhaps there is no more that I need to know.