DOWN THE HILL
By Honni van Rijswijk
2:07 p.m.
One girl photographs the other girl
crossing the old bridge, and this is the last
ordinary thing the world is given of them:
February pretending to be April,
a snow day with no snow in it,
the creek below going about its business.
2:13
Forty-three seconds, which is nothing,
which is the length of a held breath,
which is how long it takes a hand
to decide to become a witness.
Later, men in suits will call it evidence.
Call it instead the smallest bravery there is:
a girl's thumb pressing record
while her body understands what her mouth
is still too well-mannered to say.
2:14
He says one word to gather them,
and one of them answers him politely,
because politeness is the first thing
we teach and the last thing we allow,
and then he says three syllables
that will hang over the town like weather,
that a state will spend six years learning to read.
2:32
The phone stops moving. It does not move again.
after
Ribbons went blue and purple on every post.
He bought his groceries. He walked among them.
He says he did not.
She says he did not.
The recording says otherwise, and keeps saying it,
patient as water under a bridge,
in the voices of two girls
who are, forever, the only ones telling the truth.