The brush grew in a wild weave along the bank. Simon walked with his hands out in front of him, recoiling as every branch scooped down at his face and left a grid of dew and spiderwebs on his skin. The ground was littered with broken branches molding back into the earth. The soil itself was firm but it shuddered with each carefully set step so Simon lurched slowly, feeling the water sloshing and sucking in his rubber boots. He stopped and stood, first on one leg and then the other, and emptied his boots. It runneled like blood in the lightless night. He pulled them back on, banging them over his heels where they stuck against the wet pull of his socks, which had collapsed around his puckered ankles.

He set off again, following the river downstream, sometimes crawling under the canceled trees, beaver-chewed and random, that crossed one another on the bank and that lay where they fell sticking halfway in the water. He didn’t know what time it was. The river fog crept steadily from the water and floated into the crumpled earth of the banks. Simon thought he could see a change in the sky, a lighter tint against the ragged margin of trees, but he still walked arms out, with tiny steps that stuttered against the veins of tree roots half-exposed in the soul of the riverbank.

There were no sounds as he threaded the tangle. No birds, nothing nesting in the hair of the brush. Light began to bulge over the treetops on the far shore. The weeds were brittle and tense as he brushed past, crackling beneath the muzzle of mist that spun them from tan to silver in the scant light. Simon moved as if each step were a word in a sentence, a part of the answer to which way he should go. Downstream there had to be something—a bridge, a road, anything. From upriver two teal bulleted along the turns of the river, their wings doppling out of the mist until they set and tilted around the next bend.

Simon looked up at the sound and stepped out into nothing. His body pitched forward. As he hit the ground he heard his leg crack. He screamed and tried to roll to his side and grab his knee to his chest but it wouldn’t come. The pain did, and he lay gasping in the leaves, his chest huffing damply and his hands on his thigh. Everything around him was a different shade of gray, outlines of true life. He turned his head from side to side, trying to see what had happened. He propped himself on his elbows and looked down.