William Gay: Provinces of Night

The church stood. Its pews had been pried up and moved and the altar carefully born away by the deacons and perhaps they would serve some other church in some other place and time.

Then the waterway was cut from the river and the water poured down the slope toward the creek, churning and moiling and talking to itself, and the basin began to fill in earnest. There was no life here. It was a world creating itself, caught in the caesura between the scraping away of the old order and the gestation of whatever altered form might follow.

The trees had been cut and burned but the contour of the hill Fleming had lived on held itself stubbornly and the water climbed the rocky ledges toward the summit, everything drowning, the footpath and the footprints layered atop each other invisibly in unreckonable number, the ashes that darkened the water momentarily then vanished. Old voices echoed stubbornly until they drowned, re-monstrations and petulant complaints and old worn and useless endearments the rising waters silenced forever.

The water rose on implacably until it reached the crossroads, and late in the afternoon, when the light fell a certain way, you could see the beginnings of the wagon road leading down from the crossroads, see it lost from sight in the deepening water. The underwater road looked inexplicable, freighted with lost meaning, like some old imponderable road an ancient race had built to a place that no longer existed.

The author would like to acknowledge a debt to his agent, Amy Williams, and to thank her for her trust and friendship.