BRIDGE by Daniel O’Malley
He saw the old couple twice, once when they stopped halfway across to pose for a picture, and again a year later when they came back, this time without a camera, and for a while all they did was stand there.
Both times he watched from the window, which was not what he was supposed to be doing, he knew that, he knew well what he was supposed to be doing, which was studying. In the mornings, his mother would tell him things – he would follow her around the house while she did her inside work, then outside where she did her garden work and her chicken work – and he would listen and take notes in his notebook while she talked about the histories of their state and their country and their family – his mother’s family, plus his father’s family, and then their own family, the family they made when they made him – but also about the flood and locusts and frogs and other plagues that had happened before and could happen again, and he would take notes so that in the afternoon he could sit in his bedroom and study, and then in the evening, after the supper dishes were done, he could stand and recite for his father what all he’d learned from his mother in the morning.
But his memory was strong. His mother’s words found a home in his mind the moment they left her mouth. So most days he passed his afternoon study time staring out the window and down at the bridge, which was the only thing he could see between the trees.
On the other side of the bridge, he knew, was an enormous building built to look like a log cabin where people came to live for a few days at a time and eat fried fish. This was something people did, his father had told him, because they weren’t satisfied with the lives they’d made for themselves back home. And the fish, his father had said, did not come from the river beneath the bridge, they came from somewhere else. But he knew that part without his father saying, because almost always the water was low enough to see dirt and rocks at the river’s bottom. As for where the fish actually did come from, he wasn’t sure. Because once his father had said that they came from a farm in Arkansas, and he had believed his father, but then another time his father told him that the fish came not from Arkansas but from Asia, first by boat and then by train and then by truck, frozen.
The bridge had been built for trains, but trains did not cross it anymore. People crossed it now, walking, and usually only halfway before they turned around and walked back. They would stop and stare sometimes, either over the edge or straight down between the boards. Sometimes they took pictures, balancing their cameras on the bridge’s side rail.
He recognized the old couple because of their hats. They both wore straw hats with wide brims and red-and-yellow bands. The first time they came, they held hands and waited for their camera to flash, and then held hands again as they walked back. The second time, they wore the same hats, but they didn’t have a camera, they just stood there, not smiling, not holding hands, not even speaking, at least not that he could hear all the way up the hill.
Minutes passed that way before the couple began untucking and unbuttoning their shirts, then stepping out of their sandals and unbuckling their belts and their pants and taking off those things, as well as the things underneath, and pushing the clothes all into a pile that the man picked up and dropped over the rail. They threw their hats too, and then they just stood there again, only now they were both naked and – he squinted – it looked like they were both bald. He blinked several times, then held his eyes closed, and when he opened his eyes the couple was still there, still naked. He glanced at his bedroom door, which was closed. He could hear his mother whistling, water splashing in the kitchen. When he turned back to the window, he pressed his nose to the screen and watched the old couple take a step closer and hold their faces together in a way that may have meant kissing. And then he watched as they turned and gripped the rail and eased themselves over one leg at a time, and even as they fell, they never made a sound.
Remembering it, he had to remind himself that a whole year had passed between these sightings. Because in his mind they blurred together, and for moments he would wonder what happened to the camera that they’d balanced on the rail – was it still there? could it be his now?
But then he would remember that there was no camera, not the second time. The second time it was just the man and the woman, and then they were gone, over the rail and down without a sound.
His father told him it wasn’t possible, just not possible, that it happened that way. His father said that there must have been a sound, if not of voices then at least of impact, humans being as heavy as they are. And he wanted to believe his father, because he knew that what his father said was true. But at the same time, he also knew that what he himself had said was true, because he’d seen it, and, standing there in the living room after supper, as his mother folded towels and his father re-folded the newspaper, he struggled to see how everything could be true all at once.
When his mother finally spoke, she agreed with his father. She agreed that it was not possible for her son to have seen what he said he’d seen, her reason being that for him to have seen what he said he’d seen he would have had to have been standing and staring out the window, and not studying that morning’s notes, as he knew he should have been, sitting at his desk, which was a good wooden desk, made by hand by his father and facing the wall all the way on the other side of the room.
And so he said he agreed with his mother. He said he hadn’t seen anything at all, he must have imagined it. Or maybe it was a hallucination, an illusion, such as people experienced in the desert, though he had not been in a desert, he had been in his room, but maybe he needed to drink more water, he said, and his mother agreed, she said more water certainly couldn’t hurt.
But what he saw on the bridge had not been an illusion, he knew that, and back in his room he tried to see the whole thing again. It was nighttime now and the house was quiet. He got out of his bed and crawled underneath. Under his bed he could pretend that he was in a cave, or that he was a turtle and the bed was his shell, and he found it easier to think this way, easier to concentrate. When he closed his eyes, he could see it – the bridge, the couple standing there in their hats, staring, holding hands then not holding hands, then undressing, now naked, over the rail and down. And then nothing. No, not nothing, he thought. It couldn’t be nothing. He kept thinking and thinking until finally he thought, Birds. The old couple were birds, or rather they had become birds. He closed his eyes and saw it all again – the couple, the undressing, everything as before, but this time before they hit the ground, their bodies shrank and their arms turned flat and wide, flapping. He saw it again and again, each time a little clearer. Their mouths became beaks. They sprouted feathers. Their eyes turned shiny and small and black, and their toes curled and sharpened like talons – they looked like hawks – and they dipped their talons down in the water, but there weren’t any fish there. So the old couple flew on, they circled back under the bridge and up into the woods where there were mice and worms and rabbits, because to a bird these things would taste good, and actually he himself had eaten a rabbit before, though he hadn’t realized this at the time. He didn’t know that what he’d eaten was a rabbit until afterward, when his father told him. He hadn’t been happy about that. But then his father told him that rabbits were meant for eating, and his mother had agreed, and he thought about it and decided that he wasn’t upset anymore. He’d felt bad because he’d known that rabbit since it was the size of a mouse, but he decided that his father was right, the rabbit was just doing its job, which was to feed their family, and then he felt fine. He did, mostly. But now, under his bed, thinking about the old couple and the bridge and about flying and birds, he did not feel fine. He couldn’t help wondering now what if the rabbit hadn’t really been a rabbit at
Daniel O’Malley’s stories have appeared in Meridian, Third Coast, and The Baltimore Review.