Alison Stine
This was the year that the boys died in Appalachian Ohio, where the water runs red. Orange red, down from the old mountain mines and out of the ground. Such a distinctive, vivid shade. Fire-blaze bright so ubiquitous, elementary school children in my county don’t color the water on their pictures blue.
They color it red.
In 2014, two young men boys, really died in the water, weeks apart: one in the river, one in the overflow creek of Dow Lake, which feeds, thinly, into the river. The boy in the river was missing for over a month. The boy in the creek: missing not long at all.