The River's Forgiveness

"Jamie said I stank like shit. He wasn't wrong—but the river didn't care about my dignity, only about washing me clean."

Each step back toward camp felt like wading through treacle, my legs heavy with the residue of humiliation. The distance that had seemed so necessary minutes ago now stretched before me like a gauntlet I had to run, each metre bringing me closer to Jamie and the inevitable confrontation with my own failure to maintain even the most basic standards of hygiene.

The embarrassment of what had happened behind that hill clung to me more tenaciously than the dust, more persistently than the smell I knew I must be carrying. I found myself slowing as I approached, my body instinctively resistant to the moment of reckoning that awaited.

Would Jamie notice?

The question circled through my mind like a vulture, patient and persistent. Of course he would notice. The man had demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to identify weakness, to find the precise point where a comment would land with maximum impact. There was no chance—none whatsoever—that he would let this pass unremarked.

His glance, when it came, was brief. A flicker of attention, barely a heartbeat's duration. But it was enough.

"You stink like shit."

The words landed with the blunt force I'd been dreading, confirmation of everything I'd feared wrapped in Jamie's characteristic lack of finesse. My jaw tightened, teeth grinding against each other in a familiar expression of frustrated resignation. There was no point in denial, no value in explanation. The truth was exactly as advertised.

As if he wouldn't notice. But really, what else was I meant to do in such a situation?

The options had been non-existent. No bushes to hide behind, no paper to clean with, no preparation for the body's inconvenient demands. I'd done what I could with the resources available, which had been precisely nothing. The landscape offered no accommodation for human dignity, and I'd discovered that uncomfortable truth in the most visceral way possible.

I weighed my response, turning possibilities over in my mind like stones in a riverbed. Anger would serve no purpose. Defensiveness would only invite further commentary. What I needed was distance—physical distance from Jamie's observational cruelty, and the chance to address the situation before it became any more unbearable.

"I'm getting in the river. Don't come over."

My voice emerged flat, stripped of the emotion churning beneath the surface. It was a declaration rather than a request, a boundary I was establishing not just to preserve whatever remained of my dignity but to carve out a moment of solitude in this forced partnership. I needed to be alone. Needed space to process, to clean, to gather the fragments of myself that felt scattered across the Clivilian dust.

Jamie's face shifted—a subtle transformation that caught me off guard. The usual irreverence faded, replaced by something that might have been understanding, or at least the closest approximation he was capable of. He nodded, a single motion of acknowledgment that required no words.

It was a small gesture. In the grand scheme of our situation, it meant nothing. And yet, in that moment, it felt like the first genuine communication we'd shared since arriving in this cursed place.

I walked upstream, putting distance between myself and Jamie's observation post with deliberate purpose. The river's murmur grew louder as I moved, its constant song filling the silence that pressed in from every direction. Further than I'd ventured before, further than seemed strictly necessary, but the need for privacy had become almost physical—a pressure in my chest that wouldn't ease until I was certain of being unobserved.

When I finally stopped, the tent was a distant shape against the landscape, Jamie's figure no longer distinguishable from the canvas and poles. I began to undress, fingers fumbling with buttons and zippers that had seemed so simple this morning, back when I was still a man with a life and a family and a future that made sense.

My underwear emerged from my jeans in a state that made my stomach turn. The evidence of my earlier humiliation, rendered in fabric and stain, a physical reminder of everything this day had stripped away. I held the garment at arm's length, disgrace and embarrassment warring with a sharp spike of anger that seemed to come from nowhere.

The river flowed past, indifferent and constant.

Before I could think better of it, my arm was moving. The underwear arced through the still air and hit the water with a small splash, immediately caught by the current, spinning once before disappearing downstream. Gone. Evidence destroyed. Problem solved.

A sigh escaped my lips—heavy, tinged with the particular regret of actions taken in haste. What an idiot. The thought arrived too late to be useful. I could have washed them. Could have cleaned and kept and worn again, because we had nothing, absolutely nothing, and every piece of fabric was precious in a world where Luke's supply runs were our only lifeline.

But the underwear was gone now, carried away by water that neither knew nor cared about my foolishness.

It's too late for that now.

I shook my head at my own impulsiveness, resignation settling over me like a familiar garment. What was done was done. The priority now was cleansing—washing away not just the physical evidence of my earlier misadventure but perhaps some of the emotional weight it carried. The river waited, patient and forgiving, and I had nothing left to lose by accepting its invitation.

The first touch of water against my foot sent a jolt through my entire system.

Cold. Sharper than I'd expected, more intense than the gentle temperature I'd felt when cupping handfuls to my lips earlier. But beneath the initial shock was something else—an exhilaration that seemed to bypass my conscious mind entirely, speaking directly to some primal part of my brain that understood water in ways my modern self had forgotten.

I waded deeper, the river rising around my calves, then my knees. The current was stronger than it looked, tugging gently at my legs with invisible fingers, inviting me further into its embrace. The shallowness offered security—barely waist-deep at its centre—but the power of even this modest flow was humbling.

Looking down, I was struck by the clarity of the water. My feet were clearly visible against the riverbed, every toe distinct, every small stone surrounding them rendered in perfect detail. The flow wrapped around me in constantly shifting patterns, light dancing across the surface in a display that seemed almost deliberately beautiful, as if the river was showing off for an appreciative audience of one.

I lowered myself fully, letting the water rise to my chest, and the sensation was transcendent.

Cool currents caressed my skin, washing away dust and sweat and the evidence of my humiliation with equal indifference. The gentle pressure of the flow felt almost like hands—not the hands of any person, but something older, something that had been touching and healing and cleansing since long before humans existed to appreciate it.

My eyes drifted closed.

In the darkness behind my eyelids, the world simplified. The chaos of the day—the portal's rejection, Jamie's violence, Luke's half-truths, the crushing weight of separation from my children—all of it receded, pushed aside by the immediate reality of water against skin. I inhaled deeply, and the air that filled my lungs seemed different somehow. Cleaner. Purer. As if the river had found a way to wash the inside of me as thoroughly as it was washing the outside.

There was a vibration in it, I realised. A subtle frequency that I felt rather than heard, as if the river was singing in a register just below conscious perception. The sensation filtered through my senses, bypassing my analytical mind entirely, speaking to parts of myself I'd long since learned to ignore.

A smile spread across my face—wide, genuine, completely unexpected. I couldn't remember the last time I'd smiled like this, without calculation or performance, without the careful modulation I'd learned through years of navigating a difficult marriage and a faith I'd stopped believing in. This was pure, uncomplicated joy, stripped of context and consequence.

I breathed again, deeper this time, and felt something shift in my chest. The tension that had knotted my muscles since—when? Since stepping through the portal? Since Luke's phone call? Since longer ago than I cared to remember?—began to loosen. The worries that had clouded my mind, the fear and anger and grief that had become my constant companions, seemed to lift, carried away by currents that asked for nothing in return.

It was cleansing in every sense of the word. Physical and emotional, practical and spiritual. For this one moment, suspended in the flow of an alien river beneath an alien sky, I was simply present. Simply alive. Simply grateful for the sensation of water against skin and air in my lungs and the improbable gift of consciousness in a universe that owed me nothing.

Eventually, I stood.

The movement brought me back to my full height, water cascading from my body in streams that caught the light. Droplets sparkled as they fell, each one a tiny prism, fragmenting the sunlight into spectrums of colour that seemed impossibly beautiful. I watched them fall, mesmerised by the simplicity of it, the way something as ordinary as water could become extraordinary under the right conditions.

For a fleeting second, perfection didn't seem like such an impossible concept.

I stepped onto the riverbank, and reality reasserted itself with immediate, uncomfortable clarity.

The soft dust of the bank clung to my wet feet, coating them in a layer of rust-coloured grit that would take considerable effort to remove. But that wasn't what made me freeze mid-step, my face flushing with a heat that had nothing to do with the Clivilian sun.

My body, it seemed, had responded to the river's embrace in ways I hadn't anticipated and certainly hadn't intended. The combination of cold water and warm air, the release of tension, the unexpected pleasure of the sensory experience—whatever the cause, the effect was unmistakable and impossible to hide.

"Oh."

The syllable escaped before I could stop it, a single sound that somehow encompassed the full complexity of my feelings in that moment. Embarrassment, certainly. Surprise at my own physicality. A strange, uncomfortable awareness of my body as something separate from my conscious control, an animal creature with needs and responses that operated independently of my wishes.

There was no towel. Of course there wasn't. We had nothing except what we'd been wearing when we stepped through the portal, and a collection of supplies that Luke had provided without any consideration for the mundane necessities of daily existence. I sighed, the sound heavy with the particular resignation of a man adjusting to a new reality that offered no accommodation for comfort or convenience.

I shook myself like a dog emerging from a lake, water flying from my skin in all directions. It was undignified, absurd, a physical manifestation of the adaptation I was being forced to make. The droplets scattered across the dust, darkening small patches that would dry within minutes, leaving no evidence of my presence.

Getting dressed without underwear was an experience I could have lived quite happily without. The denim of my jeans felt strange against skin that had never known such direct contact, and I found myself tucking and adjusting with careful attention, all too aware that Jamie was somewhere behind me and any visible... evidence of my recent experience would provide ammunition for commentary I had absolutely no desire to endure.

With my t-shirt slung over one shoulder and my shoes and socks in hand, I made my way back to the spot where I'd abandoned my writing materials. The paper and pen lay exactly where I'd left them, undisturbed by wind or curiosity, a small miracle of persistence in a landscape that seemed designed to erase all evidence of human presence.

I settled back into my spot on the dusty bank, and in the distance, the clang of tent poles echoed across the empty landscape—Jamie, still wrestling with the shelter that might be our only protection against whatever the night would bring. Under different circumstances, the sound might have been irritating. Now, it served as a grounding reminder that I wasn't alone, that survival was a shared endeavour, that even hostile companionship was preferable to absolute isolation.

The self-pity that had weighed on me before my impromptu bath had lifted, washed away along with the dust and shame. In its place was something that might have been determination, or at least its distant cousin—a willingness to continue, to try, to face whatever came next with something other than despair.

The list in front of me remained embarrassingly short. Two items, written in handwriting that seemed to belong to a different person, a man drowning in circumstances he couldn't control. But I was not that man anymore. The river had changed something, stripped away a layer of hopelessness and revealed something harder beneath.

I picked up the pen, and for the first time since arriving in Clivilius, the tool felt like something other than a reminder of my inadequacy. It felt like a weapon. A weapon against despair, against resignation, against the voice that whispered that I was going to die in this empty world without ever seeing my children again.

With deliberate strokes, I added to the list.

Towels.