He stood on the bridge in the long light of summer and shook her out over the water. What was left of her. The powder caught the air and drifted and what did not drift fell into the brown current and was taken.

She had come from the sea and to the sea she would return. This was the law of things. The rivers of that country ran like veins toward the heart of the continent and then back out again, seeking the salt water from which all life had crawled.

The Shellrock moved beneath him, unhurried, knowing its way. His father had paddled these waters in the long afternoons. Had pulled fish from the deep bends and watched the herons rise. Now she would go where he had gone, through the channels he knew, past the sandbars and the fallen trees and the places where the current slowed and pooled.

Into the Cedar. Into the Iowa. Into the great brown Mississippi that had carried the commerce of nations and the bodies of the drowned and the silt of a thousand thousand fields. South then. Always south. Past Memphis and Vicksburg and the delta country where the land dissolved into marsh and the marsh into sea.

And somewhere in the warm waters of the Gulf she would find the current that turned east. That bent toward the islands where she had first drawn breath. The circle closing. The long way home.

He stood on the bridge. His sister beside him. The sky a blue that hurt to look at. He folded the empty bag and put it in his pocket and there was nothing more to do. The river did not pause. It never paused. It carried her south toward the sea and he watched until there was nothing left to watch and still he stood there.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​