In the spring, the river was a torrent, unfordable and violent. Sometimes it reached the parapet of the bridge. Once the parapet had been washed away. The bridge squatted astride the water, waiting patiently for the next onslaught.

The bridge was old, older than anyone could remember, older than their grandfathers and great-grandfathers could remember. But the stones were older still. The stones had been born in the first struggles of the cooling earth and had lain for millennia deep beneath the new crust, holding it up to the sun so green things would grow.

The stones were the bones of the earth, the massive tracery between the tender skin and the fiery bowels. Men dug them from their resting place, wrenching the structure of the earth apart to build their own paltry, ephemeral tracery on the skin, cutting and burning the growing things and scattering their chains over the destruction.

Continue reading : Microfiction #writephoto: Stones