This story is a metaphor that can be parsed a bunch of different ways. Since I read it I’ve thought of it as an allegory for womanhood, but also for the difficulty of leaving home, and the pull that a small town has on those who get out. At any rate, it’s haunting and will echo around in your head for days:

By the time Lacey was born, I’d long since left this place in my rearview. In the years since, I’d managed to convince myself that the creek was just a creek, and that everything I thought I’d felt was nothing more than an adolescent delusion. I swore up and down I’d never come back, but my mother can no longer manage alone, and she stubbornly refuses to move out of her house.

“You know I can’t,” she said when I asked. “You of all people.”