Winter 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 1

Aspish river, thin water marbled in three shades of brown, and a thin bridge that arches over it. That is where Emma and Danny sat every Friday evening, legs dangling over the edge, a paper parcel of hot chips and something unsaid between them. Danny was good at careful silences that made Emma feel off-kilter, sometimes stung but unsure why; Emma was good at careful silences that stopped him pressing his fingers around her arms in the way she doesn’t like, because she’s got sensitive skin, just sensitive skin. Steam coiled up, each chip a greasy cigarette. Slow death, that. Too slow. Danny liked his tobacco more, told her the girls in the office smoked Luckies to keep a slim figure, and it seemed to be working for them. Didn’t care for opium anymore, though, since it put him to sleep.

I watched from below, my favourite spot just down river where it fork-tongues in two.

Snatches of conversation always travel down, echo and repeat under the backbone of the stone bridge, against the pebbles and brick along the bank that runs toward the ocean. Someone’s cat got sick eating a plant—again. Boss is being a jackass—again. Oh, let’s stop and watch the sun going down—it’s just lovely from here. Sunset, dusk, a bruised sky darkening. Nobody has found the body travelling downstream, bloated, hair indeterminate from my own.

I remember her, ginger-haired Emma, talking to someone. Danny put broccoli in her spaghetti, like how her mother used to grate zucchini into her food to hide it when she was a kid, but she always knew, always gagged. She went hungry, he went mad, turning a cold shoulder that she wouldn’t just eat what he’d spent hours cooking—he was a business man and she was lucky he even bothered, after all. I didn’t catch what her friend, father, mother, cousin murmured, only Emma’s reply after a minute of listening. “Yeah, but he’s not all bad. He knows I’m sensitive to light and he always turns them off for me. No, he isn’t…I’d know if he were seeing another…”

A hiss of water up the pebble bank. She didn’t turn around, already having walked too far to hear. I wanted to tell her, that’s nice, but how do you know what he’s doing in the dark, what he’s doing in the other room?

A storm rumbled through, stayed for days on end. I gorged myself on the water and all the things that came with it—brown frogs, tadpoles, mosquitos, stubs, a glass milk bottle, a baby spoon stained yellow with pumpkin mash. At the fork where I split in two, a white-walled tire from a Tin Lizzie, spokes rusted, spins a constant immobile circle in the deep.

Emma came again, that time with boots on to splash a path over the bridge. Rain fell, making scales on her skin. No coat, no umbrella, only her in the jaundice light of a street lamp beneath the slate sky. I went with the tide which slithered slowly southward, to better look at her face, but she threw a cherry-stemmed pair of keys and they sliced right through me, the splash of water like an upward momentary slay of crystalline ribs.

She spoke to herself for a long, long time. Jazz played down the road, tumbling trombone and skittling piano as uneven as her breathing. Staccato words. “I don’t know what to do. I’m trying.” Hands in her coiled hair, she pulled, and I knew the pain helped her work through the overload of emotion, even if it always left her sore. The doctors have told her to take Nervine, to restrict her diet, and once even suggested her parents consent to electroconvulsive therapy to fix her aversions—I’d heard all about it when they’d crossed the bridge, seeing her grow from child to woman. Each time I had washed up no, no, and gone unheard.

Seven songs, seven thoughts about opium and putting herself to sleep. She couldn’t hear me, only the rush of the tide, gushing over serpentine edges, as I tried to tell her that trying sometimes isn’t worth it. I am wise with age, but humans cannot, or will not listen.

Hands gripping the cold iron rail, she looked down at me. We both recognised his footsteps, the mood they promised. He was angry. Went all the way to her flat and couldn’t get in. Had she seen the keys? He could have sworn he put them in his coat.

“No, I haven’t seen them. No, Danny, I haven’t. I told you I was going to be tired tonight…” Silence. “But let’s go home now and I’ll pour you a drink. Light you a Lucky.”

Emma was never good at lying. Her face and her tone always gave her away—Danny always told her so. They’d had many conversations about this, sitting on the bridge. He’d tell her she was so lovely when they met, so thoughtful, then ask why she couldn’t just make small-talk, why everything had to be big and over-thought and ruminated over like glass worn tide-smooth, why it was that she needed to be right all the time, why she was so sensitive, why, why, why. The storm kept on, a steady rumble and swell of electricity. Why, why, why. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Lightning struck, brilliant split-seam of silver-white. I’m trying. I’m just tired. I’m sorry.

They went home, his hand around her arm.

I held the keys near the shore, in case she needed to find them.

But when she came back, it wasn’t to search, but to hide. I obliged, a secret swallow and urge of water, dragging the silver keys and the sleeping body downriver to ocean’s mouth.