River Hunger

Moonlight poured itself across the river like a trembling confession, silvered and tremulous, a delicate fugue that fractured across the surface in tiny quivers, each ripple a syllable of a language older than stone, older than the footprints of any who dared its margin. The water inhaled the night, exhaling in shimmering sighs that lifted and sank in rhythm with a cosmos indifferent and patient. Shadows pooled and dispersed, a choreography of stillness punctuated by the sighs of reeds brushing the dark.

A solitary man wandered along the narrow, loamy bank, his shoes sucking quietly at the mud, leaving impressions that seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared, as though the earth itself wished to rewrite history in the softness of its memory. His gait, deliberate yet aimless, suggested a purpose he had forgotten in the waking of the evening. In the pause between his steps, the air hummed with unspoken expectation, the kind that curls in the throat and drifts through the ribs like smoke from a chimney in some half-remembered village.

The river moved with a sentience that mocked his pedestrian rhythm, a current that was patient, eternal, patient as a scholar contemplating the trivialities of human endeavor. There was an intelligence in its lapping, a hushed orchestration of murmurs that suggested a mind that had seen centuries pass like children chasing leaves. Moonlight caught the tiniest undulations, fracturing them into kaleidoscopic patterns that made the water appear to breathe, pulse, live.

Then, it spoke – a sound not made but awakened: a growl, guttural and molten, like the collision of distant thunder with the sharp edge of earth’s own hunger. The river recoiled and contracted in response, oily coils of shadow writhing beneath the surface. From the inky deeps arose a presence, an amalgam of muscle, primordial cunning, and eyes that glimmered with a patience far older than any reckoning. The crocodile, or that which resembled the name, surged with an elegant inevitability, a ballet of predation that made the river itself seem to shiver with delight.

The man’s leg found the teeth, the world contracting to the grinding inevitability of contact. A shudder traveled along his spine, a shiver that carried with it every sensation ever stored in muscle and marrow. His gaze lifted, not from knowledge but from pure astonishment, and met the creature’s eyes – luminous, black-braided lanterns of awareness, in which the river’s history gleamed, page by page, silent and absolute. A fleeting communion passed between them, a contract without terms, a mutual recognition of the hunger that shapes all forms of desire and cessation.

Water rose and fell around him like slow applause, the ripples and eddies performing a quiet choreography in the orchestra of the night. His gasp punctuated the motion, a rasp that wandered like wind through the hollow bones of some ancient cathedral, scattering the syllables of a prayer half-remembered, half-invented. He thrashed, and in his thrashing, the river tightened, coiled, and murmured around him as though whispering the ineffable thrill of participation in the eternal.

The creature’s grip maintained the solemnity of gravity, the inevitability of tide, a deliberate and measured force whose existence carried the simple, sublime joy of consummation. Its eyes, bright with primordial desire, reflected the fragmented moonlight and the infinite melancholy of water. The man’s final exhalation mingled with the river’s sigh, a fleeting spark that the current absorbed with subtle laughter, a titter of the ineffable, and then the river returned to itself, smooth and uninterrupted, as if it had never known the disturbance.

In the hush that followed, the world smelled of loam, moonlight, and something older – the taste of hunger perfected, the river’s satisfaction secret and deep. Ripples curled outward and vanished in time’s slow arithmetic, leaving behind an impression more metaphysical than corporeal, the echo of desire in its most elemental form. And in that silence, the river continued its murmured soliloquy to the night, patient, luminous, and entirely unconcerned with the passing of footfalls, the fleeting gasp of mortals, or the temporary shape of fear.