3 February 2026
The paddles on Isis Lock stick. Always the same one, north side, needs your full weight on the windlass before it budges. I know this lock. Know which gate leaks, which paddle squeals, where the moss makes the beam slick when it rains.
There is a rhythm to working a lock alone. Wind the paddles. Wait for the chamber to fill. Push the gates. Bring the boat through. Close it all behind you. Fifteen minutes of predictable physics. Water finds its level. Gates swing on their balance beams. Nothing surprising.
I did six months in Mosul the year the bridges fell. Filed twenty-three hundred words a day, every day. Slept in a basement that smelled like burnt plastic and someone else's fear. The editor wanted visceral. Wanted the reader to feel it. So I gave them details: the texture of pulverized concrete, the color of smoke against morning sky, the sound a building makes when it forgets how to stand.
I was good at it. Won an award.
The lock is filling. I watch the water rise, the boat lifting with it. The mechanism is Victorian, cast iron and oak, older than anyone alive. It has opened and closed a million times. It will open and close a million more.
A narrowboat comes the other way, a couple in their sixties. We nod. I help them with the gate. We do not speak. This is the etiquette. You acknowledge, you help if needed, you move on. No one asks where you have been or why you are here.
At night sometimes I wake to the sound of the boat settling. Just the hull adjusting to the current, wood and steel finding equilibrium. But for a moment I am somewhere else, listening for the thing I cannot name. Then I remember: I am on a canal in Oxfordshire. It is three in the morning. Nothing is on fire.
The lock is open. I push the gate, feeling the weight of the water behind it. This is the part I like best. The gate swings slow, massive, inevitable. You cannot rush it. You can only apply pressure and wait for physics to agree.
I bring the boat through. Close the lock behind me. Everything as it was.
Lock • Opuss № I