The river flows backward through Crystalline Falls, and I have come here to document this unsettling occurrence.

The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived five weeks ago, stamped with urgent red ink and accompanied by satellite photographs that showed impossible things: a waterway that defied every law of physics I’d spent fifteen years studying, flowing uphill through a town that shouldn’t exist but somehow persists in the space between what maps claim and what satellites cannot explain.

I am what they call a hydrogeologist, though the title feels increasingly meaningless as I drive through the Appalachian foothills toward a place that exists primarily in the margins of government reports filed under “Unexplained Phenomena” and subsequently buried in filing cabinets that no one opens twice. My specialty is dying rivers—waterways poisoned by mining runoff, streams diverted until they forget their own names, aquifers drained to feed cities that grow like tumors across landscapes that seem to morph the longer you set your eyes on them.

But this is different. This river isn’t dying from human interference. According to the reports, it’s dying from something far stranger.

The road to Crystalline Falls winds through mountains, gold and scarlet, and deep hues of purple. The GPS on my dashboard loses signal thirty miles before my destination, the screen flickering between “Recalculating Route” and coordinates that shift like living things. I navigate instead by the pull in my chest, a sensation I don’t have words for—as if something in Crystalline Falls has been calling my name in a voice too soft to hear but too insistent to ignore.

The town reveals itself gradually, the way secrets do, through gaps in the trees that might or might not be invitations. First, a church steeple crowned with a weathervane shaped like a sleeping swan. Then scattered rooftops that gleam like iridescent fish scales in the late afternoon sun. Finally, the main street itself, stretching along the banks of the river that flows the wrong way through the heart of everything.

Crystalline Falls exists in a valley carved by water that no longer remembers the simple mathematics of gravity. Houses perch on hillsides like pastel birds, their foundations rooted in soil that smells of honeysuckle and something deeper—something that reminds me of my grandmother’s hope chest, full of dresses worn only once and love letters tied with faded burgundy ribbons.

I park in front of the Perennial Inn, a three-story building constructed from what appears to be weathered cedar. The porch wraps around the structure like an embrace, lined with rocking chairs that move without wind and wind chimes that sing without breeze. Above the entrance, a sign painted in fading gold letters reads: “All Who Enter Here Are Already Home.”

The desk clerk is a woman whose age shifts depending on the angle of observation—sometimes twenty-five with silver hair, sometimes seventy with eyes like still water, sometimes an indeterminate number that exists in the spaces between decades. She wears a dress the color of moss, and when she smiles, I see that her teeth are made of the same material as river pearls.

“Dr. Black,” she says before I can introduce myself. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“How did you—”

“Know your name?” She laughs, and the sound carries echoes of rain on window glass. “The river told us you were coming. It’s been singing about you for weeks now.”

“Rivers don’t sing.”

“This one does. You’ll see. Why don’t you make yourself at home?” She slides a key across the counter, an object that appears to be carved from crystallized water. “Room thirteen. The window faces the river. You’ll want to keep the curtains closed after midnight.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s when it wakes up and remembers how to speak.” 

My room is located on the third floor, accessible by a staircase that climbs through the building’s heart, like an architectural prayer. The hallways are lined with photographs of Crystalline Falls from different eras—daguerreotypes showing a bustling mining town, sepia-toned images of families picnicking by a conventional river, color snapshots from the 1970s where the water begins to flow in the wrong direction, and finally, recent digital prints where cherry blossoms float upstream like messages from a future that has learned to read the past.

Room thirteen is larger than I expected, furnished with antiques I wish I could take home with me. The wallpaper pattern depicts a flock of birds that seem to migrate when I’m not watching. Through the window, I observe the phenomenon I’ve come to study.

The river flows uphill with the confidence of water that has forgotten it was ever supposed to do otherwise. Its surface carries thousands of cherry blossom petals, though no cherry trees grow within a hundred miles of this valley. The petals move like delicate dancers, like tiny boats bearing messages from tomorrow to yesterday, and they never seem to decay despite their apparent long journey through impossible currents.

I unpack my equipment with the methodical precision of someone who still believes in measurement: water testing kits, pH meters, spectrometers designed to identify molecular composition, cameras capable of capturing images in spectrums invisible to human perception. The irony of bringing scientific instruments to document something that operates entirely outside scientific law is not lost on me.

From my window, I photograph the river from seventeen different angles, adjusting exposure and filters to capture variations in light and movement. In every image, the water appears ordinary except for its direction of flow and its cargo of impossible flowers. But when I review the photographs on my camera’s display, I notice something that makes my hands tremble.

In each image, standing on the far bank of the river, is a figure I didn’t see when taking the photograph. A woman in a white dress, her face turned toward my window, her hand raised in greeting or warning or farewell.

I return to the window, but the riverbank is empty except for the eternal procession of cherry blossoms flowing toward their mysterious source.

Evening falls like a theater curtain, and I begin to understand why the desk clerk warned me about midnight. As darkness deepens, the river’s song emerges—tentative at first, like a child testing the acoustics of an empty cathedral, then growing stronger, more complex, with harmonies that sound almost like words in a language I once knew but have spent my entire adult life forgetting.

I find myself drawn toward the window, my forehead pressed against glass that grows warm beneath my touch, as if the singing has ignited something behind my sternum that responds to frequencies I cannot measure with any instrument I possess.

The song promises an explanation. It offers to show me the source of the river’s backward flow, the origin of the cherry blossoms, and the reason why a town like Crystalline Falls exists in the first place. All I need to do is open the window, step onto the fire escape that wasn’t there when I checked in, and follow the music to its source.

Instead, I force myself to step back, to trust the desk clerk’s warning.  I close the curtains with shaking hands and sit at the writing desk to document my observations in language that will satisfy bureaucrats who have never heard water sing lullabies.

Subject river displays acoustic properties inconsistent with established hydrological phenomena. Sound appears to originate from water itself rather than environmental factors such as rock formations or current variations over irregular terrain.

Sleep, when it finally arrives, tastes like cherry blossoms and brings dreams of drowning in reverse—rising from the bottom of a river made of liquid starlight while flowers bloom from my lungs and my grandmother’s voice explains that some kinds of water can only flow toward heaven. Morning arrives wearing the mask of ordinary daylight, though something fundamental has shifted during the night. The quality of shadow has changed, becoming more intentional. I dress quickly and venture outside to collect samples, carrying instruments that suddenly feel primitive against this magical body of water.

The river in sunlight appears almost normal if you can ignore its upward trajectory and the fact that the cherry blossoms never seem to reach any destination, simply dissolving into mist when they travel beyond Crystalline Falls’s boundaries. The water moves with the confidence of something that knows its own direction.

I lower my collection vial into the current and watch it emerge empty.

This defies every principle of fluid dynamics I understand. The river flows—I can observe its movement, can hear it humming softly even in daylight like a radio playing in another dimension. But when I attempt to capture a sample, my instruments find nothing. No water, no chemical composition, no molecular structure to analyze. The spectrometer reading fluctuates wildly before settling on “ERROR: SUBSTANCE NOT RECOGNIZED.”

“It’s not water,” says a strange voice behind me.

I turn to discover a man sitting on a bench, one leg over the other, with a newspaper on his lap. It is as if he materialized while my attention was focused elsewhere. He appears to be somewhere in his thirties, maybe forties, but I can’t be sure. He’s wearing clothes that might have been fashionable in any decade of the past century—worn denim, a flannel shirt that has witnessed multiple generations of seasons, with boots that have walked through territories that no longer appear on maps. His eyes hold the accumulated weight of watching beautiful things disappear.

“Then what is it?” I ask, though part of me already suspects an answer I’m not prepared to accept.

“Grief,” he says with the casual certainty of someone stating the time. “The river is made of concentrated grief.”

“That’s not scientifically possible.”

“Neither is flowing uphill, but here we are.” He gestures elegantly toward the current that carries cherry blossoms toward their impossible destination. “You want to know what this place is? It’s where the god of this valley came to die when the last of the old-growth forest was cut down, when the last of the mountain streams was diverted to feed coal-processing plants, when the last person who remembered its true name forgot how to speak the language of trees. This god is older than ours. He is stronger than any evil. He is the light in the stars, the sky behind the moon.”

I transcribe this conversation into my field notebook, framing it  as folklore research . Local resident describes river in mythological terms. Obvious psychological coping mechanism for an unusual natural phenomenon. Disregard for scientific purposes, but may indicate community response to environmental stressors.

“And the cherry blossoms,” I continue. “Where do they originate?”

“They just appear to be cherry blossoms. They come from dreams,” he says, as if this makes all the sense in the world and explains everything.

“The god collects them from everyone who sleeps within fifty miles of here. Cherry blossom dreams, mostly—dreams of spring that will never come again, dreams of trees that will never bloom because they exist only in memories, and dreams you don’t remember.”

“Why specifically cherry blossoms?”

“Because they’re the most beautiful thing that doesn’t last.”

A heaviness fills my chest, and for a minute, I think perhaps this is all a horrid dream.

That afternoon, I attempt to trace the river’s source, following its backward current into the hills that surround Crystalline Falls. The path is overgrown with vegetation I don’t recognize—flowers that have strange colors and seem to exhale rather than photosynthesize, grasses that whisper when wind moves through them, trees whose leaves fall upward and dissolve into butterflies.

The farther I walk from town, the more unstable reality becomes, as if the laws of physics have become suggestions. My surroundings are a fever dream. Colors shift when I’m not looking directly at them. Distances refuse to remain constant; a boulder that appears miles away when I start walking toward it suddenly materializes directly in my path. The river grows wider as I climb higher, which contradicts everything I know about watershed behavior, spreading like an inverse delta until it becomes an ocean of flowing grief that extends to horizons I cannot properly perceive.

At what should be the river’s source, I discover instead a lake that reflects not the sky above but some other sky altogether—one filled with constellations arranged in patterns that spell out words in languages I have never studied but somehow understand. The words are all names, written in the light of stars across the surface of water that might be water or might be crystallized time: Crystalline Falls. Remember. Ophelia.

My own name, floating among the others like a cherry blossom petal made of light.

Standing at the edge of this lake, I begin to understand what the man meant about grief. This is not simply water flowing in the wrong direction. This is a funeral procession, a memorial service for everything that has been lost or misplaced. Perhaps a return?

I reach for my notebook to document this discovery and find that my pen has transformed into a cherry blossom petal. When I attempt to write, the petals crumble, leaving pink dust on the blank page.

The sun sets while I’m still standing at the lake, though I have no memory of time passing. When I look around for the path that brought me here, I find that the landscape has rearranged itself in my absence. Trees have moved closer together, creating a labyrinth of dark shadows that lead in directions that don’t correspond to any compass I carry. I feel lost. The only constant is the sound of water flowing uphill, calling me back toward town with a voice that knows my name.

I follow the song downhill, my feet finding purchase on ground that shifts like liquid beneath each step. When I finally reach Crystalline Falls, the town has changed. The buildings appear older, more weathered, as if decades have passed while I was tracing the river to its source. The streetlights glow with a softer radiance, casting shadows that appear more and more detached from the objects that created them. There is a rhythm to moving through a new world, and it feels as if the doors of this unfamiliar one have been swung wide open.

The Perennial Inn stands where I left it, but when I approach the front desk, the clerk looks at me with eyes that reflect nothing.

“Can I help you?” she asks, though her voice carries the hollow echo of someone speaking from the bottom of a very deep well.

“I’m Ophelia Black. I’m staying in room thirteen. I was just—”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have anyone registered under that name.”

“I checked in yesterday afternoon.”

“What name?” she asks, and something cold blooms in my chest like a flower made of ice as heavy as bricks.

I tell her again, but the words feel strange in my mouth, as if I’m speaking a foreign language I once knew but have forgotten how to pronounce correctly. She continues to stare at me with blank politeness, and I realize that she genuinely cannot hear my name, cannot process the syllables that have defined my identity for thirty-two years. She looks at me with eyes that indicate we’ve never met. Her nose crinkles, and she pushes her glasses up her nose as if she is growing uncomfortable with our conversation.

“I spoke with a man by the river today,” I try instead, shifting the conversation to perhaps something she will recognize. “He told me about the god, about the grief—”

“What god?” she replies, squinting behind her glasses. “What grief?”

I return to my room, though climbing the stairs takes more effort than it should, as if each step carries me further and further away from the person I was when I first arrived in Crystalline Falls. What is happening? I think to myself.

My field notebook lies open on the writing desk, but the scientific observations I recorded yesterday have transformed into gibberish and poetry. There are some drawings on the corners of the pages, although I’ve never been one to partake in the arts. The river remembers what we choose to forget, one passage reads in handwriting that resembles mine but flows like water. It carries upstream the dreams we abandoned, the sorrows we refused to name, the god we killed by forgetting how to love what doesn’t last.

I don’t remember writing these words, but they sound familiar when I read them aloud. Through the window, the river sings louder now, its voice joined by a chorus I recognize—men and women and children, all singing the same wordless lament as if they are in a traveling choir. I open the curtains despite the desk clerk’s warning and see them: figures walking along the riverbank, translucent people wearing all white carrying lanterns made of amber crystallized tears. Among them, I recognize the man from this afternoon. He looks up at my window and waves, and I suddenly understand that he never lived in this town, has never been a resident of Crystalline Falls. He remembers me, but like me, he came here to document something. Like me, he discovered that some things cannot be documented without becoming part of what you’re attempting to observe.

I want to wave back, but when I lift my hand, I see that my fingers are becoming translucent. Invisible. Through my palm, I can observe the wallpaper birds as they migrate across the wall, carrying messages between seasons that exist only in this liminal space.

Then, with a swift, sudden rush, I am forgetting my own name, forgetting why I came here, forgetting everything except the song the river is singing and the beauty of cherry blossoms that bloom forever in the current of a god’s endless song. But I understand now that forgetting is not the same as losing. The river carries everything—names, dreams, sorrows, the accumulated weight of a valley that loved too much and lost too completely.

By morning, my room at the Perennial Inn will be empty except for a notebook filled with poetry no one will be able to understand, some of it written in a language that doesn’t exist. The desk clerk will have no record of anyone named Ophelia Black ever checking in, though she will sometimes hum a melody she cannot identify while filing reports about hydrologists who arrive but never leave, who disappear into the space between documentation and dissolution.

Everything here belongs to the river: the town, the people, the accumulated sorrow of a god that died so slowly its death song has lasted for decades.

The Environmental Protection Agency will receive notification that their researcher never arrived in Crystalline Falls, though they will discover her equipment abandoned by a river that flows backward through a town that doesn’t appear on any satellite photograph taken after sunset. Her colleagues will file the incident under “Unexplained Disappearance” and forget about it by winter, though sometimes, on very quiet nights, they will dream of cherry blossoms and wake with the taste of tears on their lips. 

Notes

This story emerged from my grief after losing a family member. The backward-flowing river became a way to explore how grief moves – not in the linear progression we expect, but upstream backwards towards memory, carrying pieces of the dead back to us in unexpected ways. The unnamed dying god in the story is the sacred presence I felt surrounding my family member’s death.

Writing this, I discovered I was exploring the way true intimacy requires us to surrender ourselves and accept our truth. Ophelia’s dissolution into the river reflects my experience of how loss transforms us at a fundamental level. We cannot witness death without being changed by it, without becoming part of the larger current of feeling that connects all living things. The cherry blossoms represent the beautiful fragments that are left behind – memories, dreams, moments of grace that persist even when the person is gone.

Sometimes true intimacy means letting go of the need to understand and allowing ourselves to be carried by forces larger than ourselves.

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