Jeff Vande Zande
My Father Wrote Short Stories Twelve years old, my father found his father, a timber cruiser wandered in from miles deep beyond the tree line, fallen down in the basement, shotgun shook from his twisted limbs, twisted the way the Yellow Dog's last few miles wind desperately as if trying to dodge the end where it dwindles into fmgers and fades out through the swale. Those last downstream miles just below the 550 bridge where, at twelve, wading waist deep next to my father, I witnessed the nature of darkness and water, how overcast skies hide our long shadows, give the trout no sign of our approach, and how the river turns through wide bends, pools beneath fallen logs in dark, constant eddies, a swallowing gloom my father swore his father dove headlong into when the fish weren't bit ing. I feared the way the river rushed me from behind,
u
Fili i #21