re-release of
River Rising
The old woman and her grandson went to the house where he had purchased the camera, only to learn their family had no connection whatsoever with the people living there, and nobody living there knew anything about the birthday party in the photographs, and nobody could remember how the camera had come into their possession. It was just an old camera one of them had bought, or found, or been given too long ago to remember.
Of course, this was mere coincidence. It was coincidence when someone took that photograph at a party long before the young man was born, and coincidence that the photographer never had the film developed or removed it from the camera. It was coincidence that the camera was never thrown away, and coincidence when it passed from the photographer’s hands into someone else’s and eventually somehow into the possession of someone who offered it for sale. It was coincidence when that particular young man bought that particular camera, coincidence that the film had not been ruined with age, coincidence that he thought it might be interesting to have the film developed, coincidence when he sorted through the stack of old photographs and left one particular image on top of the stack, and coincidence when his grandmother happened by and for no particular reason decided to look closely at the people in the image, nearly thirty years after her son’s death.
Strange stories such as this lead to many questions.
Are these kinds of coincidences really all that rare, or is the rare thing in this instance simply that somebody noticed? In other words, although the odds against this seem incredible, could it have been merely a glimpse of a something happening around us all the time?
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This is an excerpt from the new forward to River Rising by Athol Dickson, soon to be re-released in both eBook and print format.
My favorite!