David Galef
Two Streams
I went back to the neighborhood brook, a meandering line at the base of a dead-end street, stippled with stepping stones, flowing past maples and willows bent over the water, populated with tiny translucent fish and tadpoles in season, the surface stirring in the breeze and dotted with leaves headed right to left, so that on a Sunday afternoon, all the kids came on foot or by bike, in pairs or in groups, playing games that had to do with almost falling in or teasing the fish or racing twigs downstream, or just lying on the far bank to stare up at the shade-woven sky till it was time to head home for supper, feeling heavy or light but full of the stream that flowed through the day,
only it had been years since that time, now October instead of August, the wind fleecing branches pruned back to reveal a vacant parking lot on the other side, the brook reduced to a rivulet over a stony bed, and me standing there, yearning for something I hadn’t even recognized was gone, cold and alone.
David Galef has published short pieces in the collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize), long-form work in the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of the Year), and a lot in between. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He is a professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University as well as the editor in chief of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet.
