thicken

That night Amy took the Discovery out of her backpack and laid it on the living room table by the fountain. She absentmindedly let her hand play in the blue ceramic bottom of the fountain as she stared at the cover with rays of stars neatly exploding from a center of light. It's only a magazine, she thought. Nothing more. Amy flipped through the articles, stopping a moment on Pondering the Past, until she reached the picture again.

Where she had seen her sister's face before was now only grass reaching to an empty pair of shoulders. The grainy image clearly showed a label "Replication H. July 1998. Human S."

Her shoulders relaxed. Human S could not be her sister. When human S had died, Anna was still very much alive, hunched over the family mac, refusing to raft rivers or climb mountains . Amy read further. The case Discovery Magazine was talking about was in Hawaii; the corpse the picture showed had been donated from the University of Tennessee. And these world points were far too distant to account for Anna's disappearance.

There were so many events in the world that had absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever. And yet Amy's hand in the fountain drew glistening lines of connections on the vertical false rock cliffs.

empty atoms / thicken / into crowds / too trifling / to be constrained / sufficient / for shadows / under the sun

the word is / the sound / of water / dripping from/ ancient symbols / tiny particles / of merging / realities

Follow us all: Amy/Anna, Sophie/Yuki, Kit/Richard, minor characters or sift through water leavings and river journeys.