The Quiet River
What La Llorona Becomes When She Stops Screaming
INTRO
In every culture, water carries the dead. Across rivers, under oceans, through storm drains and baptismal fonts. For centuries, Latin American folklore has given us La Llorona, the weeping woman cursed to wander riverbanks, mourning the children she drowned. A warning, a punishment, a ghost who screams because her story never ends.
But what if it did?
What if her story shifted, not erased, not redeemed, but transformed? Grief doesn't vanish. It evolves. This story imagines La Llorona not as a figure of vengeance, but as something closer to Charon, the ancient Greek ferryman who guides the dead across the River Styx.
This is about what happens after the horror has dulled. When myth becomes ritual. When grief becomes purpose.
THE QUIET RIVER
They appeared as the light shifted, two figures by the bend in the river where the roots twist like knuckles and the water runs dark. A boy and a girl. Still as dolls left out overnight, their eyes fixed on the river as if it might call them by name.
She watched from a distance at first. The trees behind her offered no shelter, no shadow to shrink into. She was visible, exposed. But the children did not flinch. They waited, unmoving.
She stepped forward. Her bare feet sank into the mud. The river hissed softly, dragging reeds along its edge.
She opened her arms.
They came to her without hesitation, folding into her embrace as though they had always belonged there. Their bodies were too light, their skin too cool. She cradled them gently, one on each side, their heads tucked beneath her chin. For the first time in memory, not just mortal memory, but something older and deeper, the ache in her chest loosened.
"There now," she murmured. "It’s all right. You’re safe with me."
The wind, which had been restless all afternoon, seemed to pause. Even the river’s whisper quieted, as if listening.
She carried them to the water’s edge. She had no towel, no cloth, only her hands. She cupped water in her palms and washed their faces. The boy blinked but said nothing. The girl watched her with solemn, knowing eyes. She kissed their foreheads, one and then the other.
“The water will keep you safe,” she said. “I won’t let go again. Not this time.”
She believed it. For a moment, she truly did.
They stood like that, a broken trinity against the riverbank, until the sky blushed and the cicadas began their low, humming prayer. She held them tighter.
And then she saw it.
The boy’s sneakers were smeared with mud, but she could still make out the blinking red lights on the soles. The girl’s shirt bore a cartoon unicorn with wide glittery eyes. These weren’t the clothes she remembered. These weren’t the garments she had stitched by candlelight, years, centuries, ago.
Her heart began to sink. Slowly, quietly.
“What are your names?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
They spoke them. Simple, modern, wrong. Not the names she had screamed to the heavens. Not the names the river had carried away.
She looked past them, toward the bend where the water pooled deeper, and saw it. A car. Crumpled. Half-submerged. A rosary twisted around the rearview mirror. The smell of oil and metal drifted on the air, faint and bitter.
The truth was sudden and sharp. These were not her children.
They had never been.
But their hands still gripped hers. Their cheeks leaned into her ribs. They clung with a desperation that required no history, only need.
She had seen this before.
She had been this before.
They were lost souls. Not mythic. Not cursed. Just... gone. Plucked from life too quickly. And now they clung to the first warmth they found.
She could not give them a mother. But she could give them passage.
She had done this before. In whispers. In secret.
At first, the children had come few and far between. A boy struck by lightning. A girl pulled under by floodwaters. They found her in the stillness, unafraid of her wet hair and hollow eyes. Over time, they came more often. Drownings. Wrecks. The quiet ones who wandered too far from home.
She learned the current. She learned its language. She learned what made the journey easier.
And though she had once been feared, now she was expected.
Not by the living. But by the dead.
She was something like Charon, only she had no boat, no oar, no coin between the teeth. All she had was her voice. And her hands. And the endless ache of someone who had once failed, over and over again.
She stood and took their hands.
“This way,” she said softly. “The river will carry you. You don’t have to be afraid.”
She led them in.
The water parted around them. The current moved gently, as if cradling them all. They did not speak. Children rarely do when they’re on the threshold. Their silence was not fear. It was reverence.
As the water rose to their waists, she turned to face them.
“You’re not mine,” she said. “But you are loved. And I will carry you as far as I can.”
The boy nodded. The girl blinked once, slowly.
She kissed them both once more and stepped back, letting the river take them. It did not rush. It held them, lifted them, and moved them forward.
They did not look back.
She watched until they were gone, until the shimmer of them dissolved into the dusk, and only the hush of the water remained.
Then she returned to the bank.
The emptiness came back, of course. It always did. But it no longer howled.
She had purpose now. Not to scream. Not to haunt. But to guide.
She stayed close to the river, as she always had. Sometimes days passed without visitors. Sometimes only hours. But the lost always came. And when they did, they found her.
She washed their faces. She whispered comfort. She led them in.
And when the wind picked up and people heard a voice in the reeds, they still called her La Llorona. The Weeping Woman.
But she no longer wept.
She carried the grief of others now, not just her own.
And the river, once her tormentor, had become her road.
She was not a ferryman.
She was a mother.
Finally.
Beautiful piece.