It's Still Life

Brigid’s Diary: Part 06, Lyon

First Motion on the Rhône Steamboat

The steamboat did not startle me; it announced itself, breath thick with coal, pistons beating like a heart forced into discipline, smoke writing its claim across the Rhône as though the river had been waiting to be corrected.

I watched the paddle bite water and felt the current resist, then yield, and understood that heat does not persuade …it compels.

Felreil smiled at my questions: how does it know, what keeps it alive …and answered, “Fire, patience, and men who listen,” but it seemed to me that fire listens to no one once fed.

Below deck the engine kept time without mercy, a rhythm too deliberate to be called natural, and I thought how easily men mistake domination for progress when the noise is loud enough.

When the shoreline began to slide backward, I did not laugh; I felt instead the quiet theft of distance, villages reduced to passing scenery, the river narrowed to a corridor.

If this is how the age intends to travel, burning forward and naming it advancement, then we must learn its grammar quickly, before it decides that rivers, like people, are only useful when ordered to obey.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “order”.  Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.