Through the River
Lila Hayes
Young Artists Issue | Fiction, 2026
The Colorado River flows beneath our plane, and Andy climbs onto my lap to plaster his sticky hands onto the window as he stares down in delight. I glance down with him, though I’ve memorized its twists by now. If I was braver, he would’ve been on his way to knowing them too. Its chill could’ve been natural to him, like a second skin he slipped on slowly. I want him to know it as an extension of himself, blurring at the edges where water meets flesh.
Jess and I did, anyways—we knew it well. We learned how to paddle slowly, canyon walls swallowing us whole, and later, to race until we were hidden from my parents and forced to turn back. Paddles dipped into water became a common thing, watching the tumbling clear-water current carry a stray leaf down the narrowing rock walls, beyond us and out of reach.
____________
At our first competition, I took second place. Jess took first. I had never truly been jealous when he won. Everyone in our hometown knew how hard he trained for it, how many pull-ups he did in his little garage gym. Once, lying on the grass after a run, Jess told me that he feared failing more than anything. The air was thick that day, swollen with the expectation of a heavy rain. It had made the currents turbulent, good conditions for practice. The words slipped out of his mouth smoothly, as if he had been repeating them to himself like a chant, like a prayer.
He said it so quietly at first that I thought he was talking to himself, but I turned my head to see him a few feet away. It was as though he was trying to project them across to me, believing saying them out loud would make them impossible.
I shook my head. “You won’t,” I said, meeting his eyes and pushing myself up off of the grass. “You’ve worked too hard.”
“Yeah, Sean,” he sighed as he turned his head away from me, “that’d be the worst part.”
Jess and I were sixteen then, and had spent the summer thinking we were insufferably untouchable. We had gotten our licenses a few months before, and drove to places we’d have walked the previous year. That was the year we started calling ourselves brothers. Both only children, we clung to each other’s company the same as we did with our kayaks. In the dry heat, we were glued to the river, its constant momentum challenging us until we made it out of the final rapids. Jess won competitions and I came in second behind him. It was all we knew, all we knew of the other. It was our ticket out, and we trained like we knew it.
Two years later, Jess qualified for the Olympics. I watched his face from the sidelines, and rather than disbelief or shock, I saw relief. His face twisted up in the same way it had since we were kids, when he was trying not to laugh or to cry. I had never been able to tell which it was. He came home once more after that, and we celebrated with a run down our river. That was how it felt that day, anyways, like we were the only people on the river, like it was ours in a way that nobody else could understand.
I couldn’t anticipate the hybrid feeling that lingered in our town when he wasn’t there. Everything seemed louder without Jess, like he was the only thing I had noticed besides the river. At the same time, it was as if the town had inverted. The slamming of car doors didn’t sound the same knowing it wasn’t him, and the river faded to the background as I drove past it.
I didn’t understand, then, that you can’t bend the world to your will, not even when your brother has been gone for longer than you’ve ever been apart. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t trying to, not really. If I was, Jess would’ve come back skipping, rather than wheeling through the silence.
It hung in the air, unbroken, as Jess moved back into his childhood home. The river had been quiet for a few weeks, murky from the growing pollution and shallow from the dry heat. I
had stored our kayaks in my garage, a stumbled request from his mother, Jane. He turned his head to stare from his wheelchair before looking back across the street at me when he passed their usual place, and I could tell he knew. I looked away and went back inside.
I dreamed about Jess that night. We were on the river again, but he was asleep in his kayak, the rapids tossing his neck to the side. He was nine again. I was still eighteen. As we floated down the dream-river, he began to age, and the river began to slow until it dried. Staring up at me from the now-dry riverbed, his neck was twisted.
I went to his house more after that, where we’d sit on the back porch and pretend not to watch the river. It was like we were in a bubble that we couldn’t escape, that we weren’t allowed to talk about. All our lives, Jess and I were two halves of a whole, and the whole was always the river. Without it, we stumbled over our words and sat in silence and snapped at each other when we tried to be kind.
In the Grand Canyon, rocks are worn down slowly, with a bit of rushing water at a time. It’s a painful, achingly slow process, and pieces of them are washed away as it happens. Eventually, however, the rocks are smoothed over and shaped into something new, not quite what it was before and yet better. The thing about that, though, is that the rocks have to stay in the river.
In the end, I didn’t tell Jess when I was leaving. I don’t know what I would’ve said to him. On a dark Tuesday morning, I took the old pickup that we used to drive around town, stuffed it full of bags, and drove it down to the border. I figured I could get a job in a park and I did, working at the front desk of a lodge. I hadn’t thought about it, not really, but I didn’t bring my kayak with me. Nevertheless, I would be near a river. Always near our river. Always near Jess.
I met Mira the first year I was there, when all I did was sweat in my uniform and wish I hadn’t left. She was there with her college friends on a spring break trip. Every day, she would ask me where I’d be tomorrow. I told her, and she’d show up each time. One day, while we sat on the rocks beside the dry riverbed, I asked her how long her spring break was. She just laughed, head tilted up to the sky and framed by the midday sun, and told me it had ended a week ago.
When Andy was born, I would sit in our rocking chair with him and whisper stories down to his wide eyes. I told him about a boy who took a deep breath and swept the river current from side to side with his exhale, about a boy who stood tall upon the rocks and let the water come to him.
I pointed him out in photos, leaning close and murmuring, “That’s your Uncle Jess, see? He’s the one in the river.”
Andy gasped every time and wiggled on my lap while he clapped his hands and pointed at the photo. I brought him down to the Rio Grande that afternoon, sitting on the river bank and letting him toddle across the sandy bed, falling over in surprise when he stepped in puddles that had begun to linger. Though he didn’t know it, our river fed into this one, grains washing up on the banks like a promise that it was still there. I pretended it was the same.
____________
Andy has fallen asleep on my lap as the plane descends. It’ll be his first time in my hometown, his first time meeting Jess. My parents insisted on seeing him again, now that Mira and I had saved enough to fly up. They haven’t mentioned Jess in at least a year, since the last time I called him to tell him about Andy. He was silent over the phone for a moment. He congratulated me, said he was glad it was going well, and hung up.
The car ride to my parent’s house is slow, and the hot air sticks to me until I want to be in the river with Jess again. When we arrive, we bundle Andy into his sun hat and knock on Jess’s door.
We’ve made our way onto the porch by now, Andy patting my arms with his chubby hands excitedly and Jess just staring at him. Andy swivels his head to look at him, but Jess turns his chair to face the river in their backyard. He picks this moment, in the silence like fog over water, to begin babbling.
“Are you the river boy?” He asks, standing up on my lap now in excitement, as if he expects me to be surprised by this.
Jess turns, finally. “The—what?” He sounds a bit incredulous.
I nearly wish he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t broken us out of this sweeping dance of everything but water.
“The one who goes like—” Here, Andy begins to wave his arms around himself, knocking himself off-balance and back onto my legs. “In the river, that’s what Daddy said.” Jess looks at me for a moment, like he’s remembering everything he used to have memorized. I look back at him, forehead creased under the summer heat and the New Mexico sun.
“Well, I guess I am the river boy, then.”
Andy is even more excited by this news, and hops up once again.
“Can you go in the river right now? I wanna see.”
Jess only shook his head and smiled a little as he said, “Not anymore, buddy. I had a big accident so I can’t do that anymore.”
“Oh,” Andy frowned, “But you’re gonna be okay, right?”
Jess looks at the crown of his head, up to meet my eyes for a moment that I don’t miss, and back down to him again.
“Yeah,” he pauses, “I’m gonna be okay.”
That afternoon, we stand at the edge of the river with Andy in my arms, the same way my parents held me and Jess’s held him. It’s our tradition to dip the baby’s feet into the river. The water is higher today, bubbling over the rocks rising out of the center.
“Hey, why don’t you have him for a second, Jess?” I lean down to Andy, “I have a very serious mission for you, buddy. Can you go over there and give Uncle Jess a big hug?” He nods, though I doubt he understands what I’m saying. I set him down on Jess’ lap, and he wobbles until he finally falls, throwing his arms around Jess’ neck. Jess tucks his face into Andy’s neck, but he looks up at me with slightly glassy eyes that he doesn’t try to hide this time.
The cold, murky water of the Colorado River creeps up my son’s feet, a comically perplexed look on his round face before he bursts into giggles, beaming up at me. His legs kick out and he squirms from where I’m holding him at the shore of the river.
Later that day, we have lunch by the river. It’s low enough that I can sit on the rocks with Andy, and Jess’s chair can manage on the grass next to us.
I look at him again, trying to force the words out of my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say, and he turns his chair towards me. The rest comes out in stumbling, rocky pieces and I cough as I say, “I don’t know why—”
He looks at me, blue eyes meeting brown, and just nods.
“Yeah,” he says, “I know, Sean. It’s okay.”
I hear a giggle next to me, and I look down to see that the water has risen onto Andy’s feet again.
“Takes after his father,” Jess comments. “Always in the water.”
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece is my trace fossil because it discusses how multifaceted and dimensional relationships are. Relationships do, in several ways, define who we are and how we’re remembered, which is how I think of a trace fossil. A big part of this piece is the intentional choice to mend a relationship, as well as the choices that led to its deconstruction in the first place. Without these relationships, even foundational ones that might fade away, the echo of a life and the impacts it made would not exist, and the importance of that is what I hope this piece speaks to.”
Lila Hayes is a sophomore creative writing student at Charleston County School of the Arts. She is a national Scholastic Art and Writing medalist, as well as the winner of an American Voices and Best-in-Grade award.
Through the River
Lila Hayes | Young Artists Issue | Fiction, Winter 2026
The Colorado River flows beneath our plane, and Andy climbs onto my lap to plaster his sticky hands onto the window as he stares down in delight. I glance down with him, though I’ve memorized its twists by now. If I was braver, he would’ve been on his way to knowing them too. Its chill could’ve been natural to him, like a second skin he slipped on slowly. I want him to know it as an extension of himself, blurring at the edges where water meets flesh.
Jess and I did, anyways—we knew it well. We learned how to paddle slowly, canyon walls swallowing us whole, and later, to race until we were hidden from my parents and forced to turn back. Paddles dipped into water became a common thing, watching the tumbling clear-water current carry a stray leaf down the narrowing rock walls, beyond us and out of reach.
____________
At our first competition, I took second place. Jess took first. I had never truly been jealous when he won. Everyone in our hometown knew how hard he trained for it, how many pull-ups he did in his little garage gym. Once, lying on the grass after a run, Jess told me that he feared failing more than anything. The air was thick that day, swollen with the expectation of a heavy rain. It had made the currents turbulent, good conditions for practice. The words slipped out of his mouth smoothly, as if he had been repeating them to himself like a chant, like a prayer.
He said it so quietly at first that I thought he was talking to himself, but I turned my head to see him a few feet away. It was as though he was trying to project them across to me, believing saying them out loud would make them impossible.
I shook my head. “You won’t,” I said, meeting his eyes and pushing myself up off of the grass. “You’ve worked too hard.”
“Yeah, Sean,” he sighed as he turned his head away from me, “that’d be the worst part.”
Jess and I were sixteen then, and had spent the summer thinking we were insufferably untouchable. We had gotten our licenses a few months before, and drove to places we’d have walked the previous year. That was the year we started calling ourselves brothers. Both only children, we clung to each other’s company the same as we did with our kayaks. In the dry heat, we were glued to the river, its constant momentum challenging us until we made it out of the final rapids. Jess won competitions and I came in second behind him. It was all we knew, all we knew of the other. It was our ticket out, and we trained like we knew it.
Two years later, Jess qualified for the Olympics. I watched his face from the sidelines, and rather than disbelief or shock, I saw relief. His face twisted up in the same way it had since we were kids, when he was trying not to laugh or to cry. I had never been able to tell which it was. He came home once more after that, and we celebrated with a run down our river. That was how it felt that day, anyways, like we were the only people on the river, like it was ours in a way that nobody else could understand.
I couldn’t anticipate the hybrid feeling that lingered in our town when he wasn’t there. Everything seemed louder without Jess, like he was the only thing I had noticed besides the river. At the same time, it was as if the town had inverted. The slamming of car doors didn’t sound the same knowing it wasn’t him, and the river faded to the background as I drove past it.
I didn’t understand, then, that you can’t bend the world to your will, not even when your brother has been gone for longer than you’ve ever been apart. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t trying to, not really. If I was, Jess would’ve come back skipping, rather than wheeling through the silence.
It hung in the air, unbroken, as Jess moved back into his childhood home. The river had been quiet for a few weeks, murky from the growing pollution and shallow from the dry heat. I
had stored our kayaks in my garage, a stumbled request from his mother, Jane. He turned his head to stare from his wheelchair before looking back across the street at me when he passed their usual place, and I could tell he knew. I looked away and went back inside.
I dreamed about Jess that night. We were on the river again, but he was asleep in his kayak, the rapids tossing his neck to the side. He was nine again. I was still eighteen. As we floated down the dream-river, he began to age, and the river began to slow until it dried. Staring up at me from the now-dry riverbed, his neck was twisted.
I went to his house more after that, where we’d sit on the back porch and pretend not to watch the river. It was like we were in a bubble that we couldn’t escape, that we weren’t allowed to talk about. All our lives, Jess and I were two halves of a whole, and the whole was always the river. Without it, we stumbled over our words and sat in silence and snapped at each other when we tried to be kind.
In the Grand Canyon, rocks are worn down slowly, with a bit of rushing water at a time. It’s a painful, achingly slow process, and pieces of them are washed away as it happens. Eventually, however, the rocks are smoothed over and shaped into something new, not quite what it was before and yet better. The thing about that, though, is that the rocks have to stay in the river.
In the end, I didn’t tell Jess when I was leaving. I don’t know what I would’ve said to him. On a dark Tuesday morning, I took the old pickup that we used to drive around town, stuffed it full of bags, and drove it down to the border. I figured I could get a job in a park and I did, working at the front desk of a lodge. I hadn’t thought about it, not really, but I didn’t bring my kayak with me. Nevertheless, I would be near a river. Always near our river. Always near Jess.
I met Mira the first year I was there, when all I did was sweat in my uniform and wish I hadn’t left. She was there with her college friends on a spring break trip. Every day, she would ask me where I’d be tomorrow. I told her, and she’d show up each time. One day, while we sat on the rocks beside the dry riverbed, I asked her how long her spring break was. She just laughed, head tilted up to the sky and framed by the midday sun, and told me it had ended a week ago.
When Andy was born, I would sit in our rocking chair with him and whisper stories down to his wide eyes. I told him about a boy who took a deep breath and swept the river current from side to side with his exhale, about a boy who stood tall upon the rocks and let the water come to him.
I pointed him out in photos, leaning close and murmuring, “That’s your Uncle Jess, see? He’s the one in the river.”
Andy gasped every time and wiggled on my lap while he clapped his hands and pointed at the photo. I brought him down to the Rio Grande that afternoon, sitting on the river bank and letting him toddle across the sandy bed, falling over in surprise when he stepped in puddles that had begun to linger. Though he didn’t know it, our river fed into this one, grains washing up on the banks like a promise that it was still there. I pretended it was the same.
____________
Andy has fallen asleep on my lap as the plane descends. It’ll be his first time in my hometown, his first time meeting Jess. My parents insisted on seeing him again, now that Mira and I had saved enough to fly up. They haven’t mentioned Jess in at least a year, since the last time I called him to tell him about Andy. He was silent over the phone for a moment. He congratulated me, said he was glad it was going well, and hung up.
The car ride to my parent’s house is slow, and the hot air sticks to me until I want to be in the river with Jess again. When we arrive, we bundle Andy into his sun hat and knock on Jess’s door.
We’ve made our way onto the porch by now, Andy patting my arms with his chubby hands excitedly and Jess just staring at him. Andy swivels his head to look at him, but Jess turns his chair to face the river in their backyard. He picks this moment, in the silence like fog over water, to begin babbling.
“Are you the river boy?” He asks, standing up on my lap now in excitement, as if he expects me to be surprised by this.
Jess turns, finally. “The—what?” He sounds a bit incredulous.
I nearly wish he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t broken us out of this sweeping dance of everything but water.
“The one who goes like—” Here, Andy begins to wave his arms around himself, knocking himself off-balance and back onto my legs. “In the river, that’s what Daddy said.” Jess looks at me for a moment, like he’s remembering everything he used to have memorized. I look back at him, forehead creased under the summer heat and the New Mexico sun.
“Well, I guess I am the river boy, then.”
Andy is even more excited by this news, and hops up once again.
“Can you go in the river right now? I wanna see.”
Jess only shook his head and smiled a little as he said, “Not anymore, buddy. I had a big accident so I can’t do that anymore.”
“Oh,” Andy frowned, “But you’re gonna be okay, right?”
Jess looks at the crown of his head, up to meet my eyes for a moment that I don’t miss, and back down to him again.
“Yeah,” he pauses, “I’m gonna be okay.”
That afternoon, we stand at the edge of the river with Andy in my arms, the same way my parents held me and Jess’s held him. It’s our tradition to dip the baby’s feet into the river. The water is higher today, bubbling over the rocks rising out of the center.
“Hey, why don’t you have him for a second, Jess?” I lean down to Andy, “I have a very serious mission for you, buddy. Can you go over there and give Uncle Jess a big hug?” He nods, though I doubt he understands what I’m saying. I set him down on Jess’ lap, and he wobbles until he finally falls, throwing his arms around Jess’ neck. Jess tucks his face into Andy’s neck, but he looks up at me with slightly glassy eyes that he doesn’t try to hide this time.
The cold, murky water of the Colorado River creeps up my son’s feet, a comically perplexed look on his round face before he bursts into giggles, beaming up at me. His legs kick out and he squirms from where I’m holding him at the shore of the river.
Later that day, we have lunch by the river. It’s low enough that I can sit on the rocks with Andy, and Jess’s chair can manage on the grass next to us.
I look at him again, trying to force the words out of my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say, and he turns his chair towards me. The rest comes out in stumbling, rocky pieces and I cough as I say, “I don’t know why—”
He looks at me, blue eyes meeting brown, and just nods.
“Yeah,” he says, “I know, Sean. It’s okay.”
I hear a giggle next to me, and I look down to see that the water has risen onto Andy’s feet again.
“Takes after his father,” Jess comments. “Always in the water.”
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece is my trace fossil because it discusses how multifaceted and dimensional relationships are. Relationships do, in several ways, define who we are and how we’re remembered, which is how I think of a trace fossil. A big part of this piece is the intentional choice to mend a relationship, as well as the choices that led to its deconstruction in the first place. Without these relationships, even foundational ones that might fade away, the echo of a life and the impacts it made would not exist, and the importance of that is what I hope this piece speaks to.”
Lila Hayes is a sophomore creative writing student at Charleston County School of the Arts. She is a national Scholastic Art and Writing medalist, as well as the winner of an American Voices and Best-in-Grade award.