Confluence by Emily Brisse Jill sat on the aluminum steps of the silver trailer she’d shared with Russ these past four months and watched the creek inch not just forward but toward her. She’d seen thunderclouds approach like this, taunting and inevitable, but those she could handle. She could go inside and they’d pass. But this. If she'd known Russ had lived near moving water she might never have even come home with him that first time. Certainly not spent the night. But it had been November. There’d been heaps and heaps of early snow. And all she could see out his small windows were his pickup truck, the abandoned old farmhouse on the other side of the long gravel driveway, and these flat fallow fields. A white ocean was how it seemed. So there’d been that insinuation of water. But under those drifts, Jill sensed, was earth, dark brown and sturdy, another season, and when Russ came behind her that first morning and whispered “Stay,” she didn't want to say no. Now, though — despite these months of relative peace — this rising creek twenty feet from her ankles was making her hands shake. Russ didn't understand these changes. For the four months he'd known Jill, they’d existed in this strange harmony. He'd had his share of rough women in his forty-some years, women who bossed him around and threw things into the yard. Jill, though, was all softness and low murmurs, so different than the others, and younger, that he’d hardly blinked when she admitted in halting apologies that she didn't work, hadn't really worked for years, preferred to tend a home and take care of a man. A lot of things could be worse, he'd decided, so they went ahead, a little nervous at the outset. Their lives, though, fell in together with startling ease. He'd leave mornings for his job at the granite company, and while he was gone she cleaned their daily messes, organized his closets, read magazines. And when he came home she’d have some meal ready, something real nice — goulash or tuna hotdish — and they'd talk as they ate, and with each conversation they seemed more and more surprised that they had so much in common, this being sort of a chance and convenience thing. And the sex was good, too — neither of them expecting too much, just a real easy way of moving together. It wasn’t something they put words to, but they’d each started to glance at each other when the other wasn’t looking with this hope. It was like they were peeking through window blinds, thinking, Maybe.
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Santa Fe Literary Review