riverbed

He saw the kind of beauty yellow flowers have growing over a carpet of dead leaves. The beauty of cracks forming a mosaic in a dry riverbed, of emerald-green algae at the base of a seawall, of a broken shard from a blue bottle. The beauty of a window smudged with tiny prints. The beauty of wild weeds.

Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word __undred_ meant, but when numbers wandered off toward __housand___r even __illion___nd the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan__ mind shied back in horror.