The Current Reverses

You feel it before you see it — a wrongness in the water's pull. Whether your oar bites the surface or your thumb presses the radio's transmit key, the river is pushing you inward now, deeper into the dark. The reeds bend the wrong direction. The barge creaks and drifts against every correction you make.

Then the radio hisses to life on its own. Through the static comes a voice — calm, unhurried, achingly familiar — reading coordinates in the same low cadence your father used on night watches. He has been dead for six years. The numbers keep coming, steady as a heartbeat.