The Well's Forgotten Wishes

By Peter Bowden

 


The well sat in the throat of the woods where the birches grew thick and white. It was old stone, grey and bitten by frost, holding its breath beneath a canopy of choking ivy. For forty years, the bucket had not moved. The rope had rotted into a black dust that smelled of ancient rains and dead beetles. There was no wind down in the dark of it, only the heavy, cold scent of deep water that had forgotten the sky. It stayed there, a blunt cylinder of rock, waiting for a hand that never came.

But October arrived like a circus train, spilling crimson fire and the scent of burnt popcorn across the hills. The well felt the change in its cold bones; it remembered when children ran through the timber, their pockets heavy with copper promises. A single leaf, dried to a crisp autumn gold, detached itself from an oak and spiraled down into the dark. It drifted past sixty feet of mossy silence, a tiny parachute of dying summer, until it touched the black mirror below. Click.The water shivered. It was the sound of a mechanical clockwork heart starting up after a century of sleep, a brass cog catching on a rusted dream.

A boy came through the trees then, or perhaps he was only the ghost of a boy who had lost his way in 1924. He did not look at the stone, but he felt the pull of the deep water, cold and clean and terribly old. He took a buffalo nickel from his pocket, the metal warm from his thumb, and dropped it into the mouth of the earth. The well swallowed it without a sound. Down below, where the old wishes lay tangled like sleeping silver fish, the water surged, tasted the copper, and began to boil with a terrible, beautiful light. The woods were very still, and then they weren't.

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