By James Moran
“Let’s go to the well,” Henrietta suggested from my doorstep because the countryside was the same all around and offered children like us nothing else to do.
She skipped ahead of me and circled back and got under foot as she looked for tiny flowers in the same brush that I was dragging an iris blade over in passing.
We pulled up our skirts in anticipation of the muddy ground around the well. The well itself was just a hole in the earth filled with green water. Henrietta rushed ahead and crouched and asked a frog she pretended she knew to come out of the water.
I paused. I knew the cool air touching her face.
“What if this is the deepest pool in the world?” I blurted.
“What?” Henrietta asked.
I became proud of my new use of the word ‘pool.’ “What if it is?” I asked.
She squinted at the well, as if it was the well that perplexed her and not my strange statement.
I insisted, “What if that’s the deepest pool in the world right there?”
She shrugged, and finally went quiet, and became still long enough for me to approach and hand myself over to the touch of the cool air on my face.
* * *
James Moran is a professional astrologer who regularly publishes articles, fiction, and poetry. His work has been published in two dozen publications, including Ping-Pong, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Door is a Jar. His published works can be found at https://jamesmoran.org/the-creation-playpen