The River cut through the Earth along the Southeast of England, it had been there for too many years to matter. It's entire length stretched many miles, but for only twelve feet of that, it became special in this boy's life. For twelve feet if became part of his little kingdom.
   Not that, he imagined during adolescence, the River knew or cared whether it ran along this small plot of land. But he cared. Always for an hour after school, he would sit at the bottom of the garden, sitting on a bench his father crafted from an old railway sleeper mounted on some bricks. He watched the water crawl by, sometimes focusing on twig and leaves drifting along on the surface: the River's little hitchhikers, on a one way day-trip to the sea.
   To the boy, the River represented everything he'd ever wanted, power, knowledge, and eternal life. The River never began, and the River never ended. During childhood, the concept of infinity was only beginning to be explained to him. But, as he told an uninterested classmate; "God does watch over us, He sent me my river."
   Despite the boy's devotion to his well-loved metaphor; the River almost washed away his life. It was a warm summer day, no more usual than the last or the next, that the boy fell in. For a moment, the boy remained passive, expecting the River to life him up and out of the water. But then his heart did cartwheels in terror as, instead of saving his princely soul, the River just pulled him down and down.
   It was only at the intervention of the boy's much-spoiled sister that the River released him from its icy-cold grip. As the last drop of muddy water was expelled from the boy's lungs, his last drop of adoration went with it. Now, when he looked at the River, he did not see a guardian angel, but a silent monster of logic and science. As he fell through the lifeblood of his deity, he felt no reliving warmth that his parents told him he was meant to fell at church, The River was a channel of water, nothing more. When the end of the world came, and the seas boiled up into the sky, so would it. But, as he stared at It, through the conservatory window, all he could think about was that he had left something at the bottom of the River, his naiveté and his faith, gasping for air in the mud-choked water.