Flash Fiction 2nd Place: I Search Her Eyes for Rivers by Hannah Retallick

Grandma once said it’s ridiculous when books say tears fall and splash because if anything they trickle. I said mine do. It’s all about the tilt of your head, the angle, and how much you’re bawling. She never cried anyway. She didn’t know what she was talking about.

I know about crying like I know about rivers and their tributaries. The way water carves paths down cheeks, how sobs erode you to your core. Geography, the study of the Earth and its features. They should study me.

I sit cross-legged on my bed, feet numb, tears drip drip dripping onto the textbook. The page wrinkles, words blurring. That’s how coastal erosion happens; wearing away the solid ground until it gives. My shoulders shake with each new wave.

Mum finds me surrounded by tissues and perches on my bed. ‘Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.’ She plucks a tissue from the box beside me and dabs the open page of Visualising Physical Geography. ‘Careful, this is a library book, you know.’

Of course I know. Grandma took me there five weeks before to help me find ‘supplementary material’. She’d planned to return it once I’d made notes, but I haven’t even started, and now it’s overdue.

‘Take a break,’ says Mum. ‘It’ll all be okay. Start afresh tomorrow.’

I want to tell her about weathering, about how feelings can break down the strongest rocks, but my throat is a dried-up riverbed.

‘Can I get you anything, sweetie? Water? Tea?’

I search Mum’s eyes for rivers but find sad, empty caves. Silently, she smooths my hair and hands me another tissue to dam the splashes that aren’t meant to be possible. Maybe Grandma didn’t believe in the harsh realities of erosion either, and yet here we are, and here she isn’t.