Loss – The Word Worker

The Bridge

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It only appeared in the fog, the old bridge. Not the morning fog when the rising sun burned off the surface of the river. The rare sunset mist defying the golden glow spilling over the horizon. The mist that was both there and not there, with impossible shapes darkening it. With the bridge that couldn’t be.

She had seen it before. A child’s vision, obscured by the cynicism of time. Only his disappearance had made the memory real. She hadn’t been to the river that night, when they said he drowned. She hadn’t been there, but she knew anyway. He would never have drowned.

He had crossed the bridge. Of course he had crossed. He probably just wanted to look, to know where it went, what those dark shapes in the fog became when met face to face. He wouldn’t have thought about it at all, never would have meant to leave her like that. But mist never lasted.

She could see it now, old stone glowing gold in the damp. He could come back now. Any minute she would see him, a little older, rushing back to reassure her and plead his remorse. But how would he know? What if he missed the fog as she had that night? Already the mist began to lift, and she could almost make out the wall across the river.

With a gasp she ran, oblivious to the sole of her foot scraping through the hole in her shoe. The worn strap on her old knapsack fragmented under the sudden strain, depositing her entire life behind her. She clutched the stone as she stumbled onto the span, gasping, desperate. If she held on, if she kept going, it couldn’t vanish. He would come.

She stumbled forward, calling frantically. The sun flared once behind her before gloom closed in. A few more tottering steps, just a few more and she would find him. He hadn’t been able to come to her, she would go to him. They wouldn’t need to go back.

A shadow coalesced beside her. She whimpered, not afraid, relieved. Here was someone to help. The figure smiled, took her hand. She followed, docile. The mist had lifted, of course it had, she didn’t need it anymore. The bridge had brought her home.

Candles

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The dried up, decomposing vines brushed her skin, tendrils of the darkness that protected what was left of her soul and crushed the breath from her lungs all at once. The candles in front of her flickered, pitiful against even the promise of wind in a trembling leaf at the edge of vision. Only three. How had three broken candles been all she had to offer for a shattered life?

Hot wax rearranged itself drop by drop into the shape of glass cups, insulation to prevent fire. As if she wasn’t already burning, endlessly unconsumed but raw. As if it had been her skin stolen from her instead of… instead. How many days since she had been able to breathe? A week? Two?

Orange globes peeking from a sea of green. Teeming life. Life on the edge of death; the smell of rot was more appropriate. Death for death. Orange flickered with the flame, mocking, demanding. Only three candles.

People did light candles for death, didn’t they? The trembling leaf released its hold, a moth fluttering to burn, disintegrated, forgotten. No. Never that. How can a chasm be forgotten? There should be stars. If there weren’t enough candles there should at least be stars. Where were the stars? Grieving. Maybe they would die, too; that would be fitting. Stars dying for loss of her Star.

Goosebumps rose under her fingers. Vines whispered. Flames guttered and fell. Only three broken candles.

Dry

Color surrounded her, the brilliant yellows and reds and greens of summer in the garden. The sky glared blue overhead, and she glared back at its near cloudless face. Her hand closed around the nearest white spray, twisting involuntarily, the crushed petals releasing their nauseatingly sweet scent as they fell from her fingers.

She took a shuddering breath, her chest aching as if with vacuum. The fountain nearby was as dry as her eyes; she resented it’s deathly emptiness. Perhaps the red that surrounded it was the remains of the bloody tears of its untimely end, an irrevocable stain on the land. She pressed her fists into her eyes until they ached, silently screaming for a single drop of relief.

A hand touched her shoulder and she flinched. “It’s going to be alright,” someone said, and the hand caressed the black of her sleeve like flame licking at tempered steel. Her arms fell nerveless to her sides and she walked away without a word.

Footprints

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The old ones called these valleys the footprints of the gods. Impossibly pressed between rocky conifer peaks, the rich dark soil harbored fertile fields and close-knit villages. The only paths in led through crevices and over streams accessible only by foot, cutting us off from all but the most adventurous outsiders. Few even of those stayed long, usually flashing a lot of coin about until they discovered how little value it held here.

According to the old ones our people sprang from the magic left when the gods themselves walked the earth to view their creation. Though others came after to fill the lowlands, they were lesser, lacking the mark of the trueborn and unattuned to the land. Its bounty fed our spirits and held us within our ancestors’ prints for many long lives of soulless men.

Until the greed of the lowlands could no longer resist the lure of the high valleys. The day the peaks exploded changed everything. When the dust settled on the broken pines, the mark of the gods was gone. One by one, the old ones failed, their spirits choked like our lungs by the fumes of destruction. Our villages in ruins, our graves buried, we few who remain will find what comfort we can in the forests of the outside.

The Edge

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They called it The Edge. In reality it was a dam, the greatest feat of engineering ever achieved. The power of the great glacier harnessed, tamed, to do man’s bidding. To him it was more.

The wars of the twenty-third century had left scars upon the fertile equator and stripped the temperate plains to desert. With water rationed and food scarce, desperation had created The Edge to warm and distribute the ice of the polar climates. Longing for what was lost had diverted a mere fraction of arctic power to pockets of living memory.

Like this mountain stream, tumbling rocks over and over in its tiny rapids, only to filter through the moss into infinitesimal falls. Like many, he came often to walk the swinging bridge, artificially propped above waters that could have been waded, hung at the edge of empty air like so much possibility. Unlike many, he came to grieve.

He knew what others would not acknowledge. The Edge, the last great hope, was doomed. A century, maybe, could be wrung from the glacier, but no more. If the scars were not healed, and soon, The Edge of the future would be its end. And with the insulation of memory become recreation, there would be no healing.

The Box

She closed the door slowly, keys slipping from her fingers to the entryway table with an absurdly loud clatter in the silent house. A light showed dimly under the kitchen door and her feet moved automatically in that direction.

Her hand slid across the door as she pushed it open and a broad swath of light broke the endless night of the hallway. The overhead lamp blazed above the breakfast table, showing off the place settings for two ready for the next morning’s date. She touched the edge of one plate, fiddling with the paper napkin hanging slightly over.

She squeezed her eyes shut and sighed heavily before looking to the center of the table. Pink roses lay in no particular arrangement around a tiny cardboard box tied with brown cord. Her hand shook as she reached for the box, and nerveless fingers bent the edge of the note stuck beneath the knot.

He should have been the one to open it. He should have been waiting for her as they had planned. It should have been the beginning of the rest of their lives. It wasn’t fair. A panicked urge to flee backed her into the door that had swung shut behind her, and she slid to the floor with the box crushed against face, dissolving slowly in unheeded tears.

The Warp

FB_IMG_1590604606681 The city burned. Well, technically speaking, cities, since there seemed to be several versions all at once. It had started on Times Square. Everyone on the street suffered the same blinding headache at the exact same moment, and when they recovered the billboards had been replaced with the original New York Times building. Brand spanking 1904 new. Except that 1904 hadn’t had access to 2020 technology, and within seconds broken electrical wires and gas lines had exploded half the building.

It hadn’t stopped there, obviously. No one knew what had created the time rift, but every explosion warped it further. Theatre facades from the 1920s replaced gleaming modern glass and steel, only to burn. Modern street signs stood before the flaming remains of storefronts from the 1800s. Over it all towered the twisted and shattered skyscrapers of the last forty years.

After the buildings, the warp affected living things. First trees and other greenery shifted and broke, sparks from the blazing city setting them alight like living torches. Then people began to change. Some were suddenly mysteriously confused, insisting they were someone else and cowering in terror. Others simply disappeared, while men and women in costumes from long ago days blended in bewilderment with the screaming theater crowds. The worst cases no one talked about, the ones caught between as the rift continued to warp. The ones who didn’t survive, could never have survived.

Most fled, trampling each other in wild abandon like animals racing a forest fire. Here and there a trace of humanity survived: a man snatching a crying child from the path of a bus careening out of control, a woman supporting an elderly man who could barely hobble. For the most part, civilization fell to its basest instincts, the urge to survive at all costs.

It was vain. The city lay silent, its hodgepodge of time staring with bloodied and emptied eye sockets on a burning concrete wasteland.

The Memorial

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There they hung, the uniforms, lining the hallway where they had hung all my life. It would be the last time he walked past them for many months, probably years. He took it slowly, pausing before each one to remember.

First the cuffed olive green of his great-great-grandfather’s, the pockets fraying away and the seams worn with age. Although it had been well laundered, he could almost see the bloodstains that must have covered it as it had carried the wounded back behind the lines amid the spatter of gunfire. He rubbed his fingers together, slick with the imagined mud that soaked the fabric in the shallow trenches as rain and explosives pelted the ground. He smiled at the thought of the wrinkles crushed into it by his great-great-grandmother when she welcomed her husband home safely.

He wondered what she had felt when she saw his great-uncle march away wearing the next uniform on the wall. The green had once been the same, but time had faded it less than its predecessor. This one had been mended, the holes where shrapnel had ripped through it still visible despite the stitching. He imagined his great-grandmother’s hands shaking as she arranged the pieces, the only thing returned to her from the trenches of France. Her son’s body had long since returned to dust in the very fields where he died, his cross tended by grateful strangers.

Next hung his grandfather’s tiger stripes. His grandfather had never been able to talk about what had happened in the jungles on the other side of the world. He had watched his grandsons grow and play with distant, haunted eyes. Loud noises had always agitated Granddad, and Grandmother had quietly sent the boys home whenever Granddad lost his temper and started yelling about cowards. His heart had been broken, she had explained, first by the horrors of the jungle war and then by the resentment and ingratitude when he returned safe but changed.

The last uniform was the most important to him, and he placed his hand on the glass case as if by doing so he could touch its owner. Dad had put on the sand colored uniform with its rusty splashes of color as a way to honor the father whose sacrifices had been forgotten. He had worn it proudly for five years, seeing his tiny son only a handful of times before hitting a land mine in a faraway desert. His picture and this last uniform were the reason for this last walk today.

By this time tomorrow, a fifth uniform would begin its own journey to the wall. He placed his forehead against the glass in the closest thing he remembered to a hug from Dad. “I’ll make you proud, Dad,” he whispered before continuing his last walk out of the front door, the promise hanging in the air as the final memorial.

The Elevator

FB_IMG_1589902792589 I stood on the boardwalk, gazing out at the elevator glowing faintly in the reflected light of the moon. The water was eerily still, barely a whisper in my consciousness. Pap, Mam, and I had been in line on the boardwalk since a week gone, since the day we were granted our tickets at the shore office. We’d been given a week’s rations in a wheeled cooler, issued uniforms in various shades of blue according to the strict set of guidelines posted on the wall of the office waiting hall. Mine was an ugly flat royal shade with large pockets and no distinguishing marks, the uniform of a pre-productive student. I hated it.

Pap and Mam sat on the the single duffel bag we had been given, that held the change of uniform provided, our passports and tickets, and the few personal items we had been allowed to bring. Their backs against the opposite rail, they huddled together, Mam’s head on his shoulder. She beckoned for me to join them, but I wasn’t ready for sleep yet. The elevator stood visible at the end of the boardwalk, just waiting, motionless for the first time since we had first seen it early that morning. Over and over I had watched it spin its way under the waves, carrying family after family to their new future.

I folded my arms on the railing and set my chin on them. Pap had talked for weeks and weeks about fair work, and new opportunities. Mam had been dreaming about a new house and neighbors. They hadn’t asked me what I thought. I remembered Ellie’s face when I told her we were leaving. And Boris, who had scowled and stomped away never to speak to me again. They were my best friends. We had done everything together since we were tots. Ellie and I had made pinkie promises just last year in third form to grow up and take care of each other. Boris and I had planned to join the Fieldball team together next year. Now I would never see them again. No one who went below ever came back.

That was the deal. Start over, that’s what they said. No ties to above. Personal items were heavily restricted, only useful items allowed. I was just glad that my fieldball was considered a useful item for a pre-productive. Mam had her art supplies; they barely qualified, and she had cried over leaving the portrait she had painted of Granda and Grana. No ties, not even to memories. Pap had a handful of books; they wouldn’t let him keep his Pap’s tools.

In the morning the elevator would descend empty and bring the welcomers up from below. Their white uniforms and slicked-back hair would shine in the early sunlight, like the surface of the waves. Only welcomers wore white; only welcomers ever returned to above. They would walk down the final stretch of boardwalk to unlock the gate, where they would stand and count the people jostling through. When the day’s limit was reached, they would close the gate, and those behind it would watch the space gradually widen behind the lucky ones who made it to the elevator.

In the morning we would be the first. In the morning we would see the sun, the surface of the ocean, the above, for the very last time. We would step onto the elevator with the shining welcomer and spin into the depths forever. So tonight, I stood at the railing and watched the moon. Tonight I said goodbye.

The Frost Bubble

FB_IMG_1577495577958 Nevaeh blew through the wand, her breath white in the crisp air. I shivered, wishing I had taken the time to grab my coat before following Nevaeh out here. Despite skin the color of chalk and deep hollows in her cheeks she seemed unbothered by the cold.

Moving ever so slowly, she touched her bubble to the icy railing. The tiny feathers of ice that crept around it’s circumference seemed to be drawn from the chunk of ice filling my chest. They mirrored the blue lace of veins marking my daughter’s bare skull, the chill reminder of a fragile life.

Nevaeh laughed with innocent delight, for the moment forgetful of weakness. She clapped her hands and I wondered at the normal sound. I could almost have expected the clacking of bone, but not yet.

She stretched one finger to gently touch the feathery surface, only to see it crumble beneath her hand. Her sigh seemed to deflate her like the bubble, her strength gone like that of a frost fairy in spring. She wrapped her arms around herself and shuffled back inside as a single frost feather brushed my cheek.