the mother of god

To Whom it May Concern:

Let me tell you a story. 

Once upon a time in Bolivia, there was a woman who lived along the banks of the Rio Madre de Dios, or the River of the Mother of God. Each morning this woman would walk a mile down the bank of the river and a mile back, thinking, planning. She was a beautiful woman, tall and shapely with hair as black as the warm Bolivian night. When the wind blew, her hair fanned out behind her like a banner flying proud over a castle. This woman, she was proud and strong. Her mind was like a fortress: impenetrable. So one could say that she was a castle in and of herself. 

One day as she was on her morning walk, she happened upon a child sitting against a rock near a part of the river where the water grew rapidly and debris from the forest swirled around in eddies like fence posts in a tornado. There the child sat, watching the churning water, staring with recognition and acknowledgement as if his own life was a mirror of that downward spiral. Strange, dark thoughts for small child of perhaps seven or eight years. 

The woman had walked up to only a few feet from the child before he looked up. His eyes were black as death. He did not speak. Never before had she seen this child, and it was a strange occurrence to run into anyone alone in this part of the wild, let alone a small child. She might have thought he was lost if not for a certain presence about him that made it seems as if there was no place else he meant to be than precisely where he was.

The child stared at her unblinkingly, with a blank expression on his face. When at last he spoke, his voice was soft and high as any child’s voice might be, yet it was strangely powerful and shadowed with a low, almost inaudible rumbling much like that of an earthquake. 

“El rio da la vida, pero lo puede sonsacar su alma. Después, todo cambia.”

Immediately the woman began cry, for the child’s words seemed to answer the questions that had been plaguing her. In the past she had transgressed in ways that are not to be forgiven. Her transgressions necessitated further transgressions, and thus created swirling eddy of evil that would eventually consume her. 

On her walks along the riverside she would plan and scheme of ways to escape her past, but each strategy included another murder, another deception, another destruction. In her heart she questioned whether she could ever escape with both her life and he soul still intact. But upon hearing the edict of the small black-eyed child, she knew that she could not. His words delivered to her the knowledge that she had no control over her life. The currents would swallow her. There is no escape.

The child stood still staring into the woman’s eyes, but now he smiled. Yet his smile was no kind condolence but a mocking grin so full of amusement that there was no room left for even a glimmer of pity.

He turned and disappeared into the forest.

The woman drowned herself in the river.

El Rio de la Madre de Dios.

I’ll leave that for you to interpret as you will.

Signed,

Timothy Booth