Vanitha Sankaran's Pick: "A delightful piece of whimsy, strongly portrayed with atmosphere and subtext."
He learned to live by the river, now that the sea was forbidden to him, and even a lake might be enough water to foster bad ideas. Each morning he tottered out to the bridge, his prosthesis wobbling beneath him, and clasped his hands on the rail, staring down into the rush of brown water, and wondered. Wondered where it had come from, where it would find itself. Would this drop wash across the Atlantic, and that one to the Orinoco Flow? Would the speck of foam now surfing on a rain-flushed hydraulic wash ashore someday at Dry Tortuga, or round the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar?
"A lovely day, Mr. Roberts, wouldn't you agree?" the old spinsters asked as they passed him, and he gave them each a little nod and cleared his throat. And when the other old men came at night and asked him to slip out for a nip of rum and a tale from his sailing days, he shook his head, and smiled a gleaming, gold-toothed smile, and promised to take up with them again some other night. Then he wobbled his way home and sat in the parlor watching the Discovery Channel, surrounded by pictures of sailing ships and a hundred thousand messages in bottles gathering dust up on his shelves.
John Parke Davis is a young lawyer living in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his lawyer/writer girlfriend, two cats, and brain-damaged dog. His work has previously appeared in Shimmer Magazine and The Drabbler, and he maintains a not-for-profit write-off with his brother that is chock full of interesting stories at http://thestorygame.googlepages.com.