The River

They took a walk off the beaten path one Sunday afternoon, and he carved her name into a tree by the river. “We’ll come back someday and find it” he promised, and she believed him. But two years later they had gone their separate ways. Five years after that he was dead.

Somewhere there’s a tree in the woods with a young girls name carved across the trunk. And no one is ever going to look at it the same way that he did.

I can’t think of anything worse than that.