The Fish Between Rivers

The Fish Between Rivers

An Alchemical Fable by Delahrose

There once was a fish who had swum every rhythm of her river. She knew each bend, each stone, each whisper of current that pressed along her silver skin. The river had been her cradle and her compass, but she began to feel its narrowing. The waters that once carried her now felt small, their taste too sweet. Something beyond the horizon called, vast, salted, ancient.

So she followed the call downstream until she reached the estuary, where the river opened its mouth to the sea. There, the water was strange,  half familiar, half foreign. Tides moved both ways. The sand shifted beneath her fins, soft one moment, treacherous the next.

She had drifted to the mouth of the river, where the water forgot whether it was sweet or salt.

Her golden tail gleamed beneath the thin skin of tide. Around her, silt and shimmer, the trembling edge between safety and surrender. She could feel the pulse of the ocean calling, heavy with salt and memory. Yet the river clung to her scales like an old love, refusing to release.

She knew: one wrong movement, and she’d beach herself on the sand.

One too-hasty surge, and she’d drown in waters not yet meant for her lungs.

She tried to swim forward, but the salt stung her gills. She turned back, but the fresh water now felt thin and tasteless. The fish hovered in the turbulence, neither here nor there. Around her, the silt swirled like ghosts of old selves, and the sun above flickered through the waves, dazzling and cruel.

She thought, If I stop moving, I’ll die. If I move too soon, I’ll beach myself.

So she did what no creature of the current ever does: she floated. Perfectly still.

So she waited, half-dreaming, half-dying, in the shallow alchemy where endings and beginnings blur.

Days passed. The tide shifted. The mixing of salt and sweet carved new patterns inside her blood. Her gills learned the chemistry of both worlds. The confusion that had felt like suffocation became an inner alchemy.

When the next tide came, she did not fight it. The water lifted her belly, turned her with grace, and the ocean, the vast mother, took her whole.

There, her scales shone differently. The river had given her innocence; the ocean gave her depth. She did not abandon her past; she diluted it until it became part of the greater salt.

Moral:

When you are between two waters, do not thrash for direction. Let the alchemy of mixing change your nature. The river teaches flow; the sea teaches vastness. The outlet teaches surrender, and it is surrender that transforms the swimmer into the tide itself.

Delahrose Roobie Myer

(Author of Fatima’s Alchemy - A Treasure To Behold - a book of short stories journey’s teachings and metaphors) 

Oct 28th 2025

www.delahrose.com