Under the Bridge *short story*

You had grabbed my hand and dragged me down the street to show me something.  I wasn’t surprised, as this wasn’t the first time you’d done this sort of thing. I ran beside you, laughing like we always did. You stopped at the edge of the bridge that runs over the creek. You got very quiet, and I followed your every action. You knelt down at the edge of the bridge and carefully lifted the first wood panel. After a few seconds I didn’t see anything. Then, looking closely, I could see little pebbles that are perfectly round and smooth from the current.

You always liked little things like that. Small, insignificant things that anyone else wouldn’t think twice about. But not you. You’d think about it a hundred times and say the rocks were so selfless to give up parts of them to make it easier for the water to pass over them until they’re nothing but dust, and then nothing at all. We’d make stories of how the water was in love with the rocks but were forbidden to be together, so the water took small parts of the rocks at a time so no one would notice they’re together until they were completely unified.

I liked the story where the water wasn’t actually there and the rocks were just paranoid and gave up themselves to their madness. It reminded me of you. Mother laughed at the stories we made up, but I truly believed you knew they were true.  The trees really were in love with the wind and danced when it sang. Just like the grass tickles grasshoppers and the bricks in the walls missed their families back in other countries where they were made. You surrounded yourself with these hidden truths and you fell into your own madness. Our world seemed almost unknown and new to you.

I remember you laying in the field talking to the grass for hours. They all loved you. Butterflies would land all over you until you were covered in them. They understood you and you understood them. You told me their secrets with your hazy eyes and I remember watching you slip away again and I just left you to talk to the field.

That’s when mother started crying. She cried all the time. She would yell at me for encouraging your fantasies and scream at me till I couldn’t breathe. When your eyes weren’t glazed over, you’d defend me in your whispered way to make mother stop screaming.

“She didn’t do anything,” You said, staggering. She didn’t listen.

“They would still talk to me whether she was there or not,” You said slightly louder. This was your way of yelling. Mother cried again and scolded you for raising your voice. Your eyes found their way to the window and you casually walked outside despite mother’s pleas for you to return. You then laid back down and it was like we never existed in the first place.

Every other kid in our small town knew you as the girl that talks to fairies. They loved you just like your fantasies. However, I was the weird one that was always sore and some odd shade of gray from lack of showering for weeks at a time. They seemed to love you more than anything and treated you like some kind of saint. You were in fact the very opposite. You had almost jumped off of the top of the football stadium to catch a bird that you had been chatting with. You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me. You nearly drowned trying to save a tree branch that was screaming for help in the lake. You knew all of these things and had always said you owed me. Of course that never happened, not that I expected it to.

You were like a tourist site. People would go out of their ways to see you lying in the grass and some small kids would lie with you and try to listen for their soft voices. Some mothers laughed and let them have fun. Others would pull their child away and cursed at you. They cursed me too, even though I’m the little sister and it should be the other way around. They all treated you like a child.

Other kids’ moms tried to tell mother to send you away to somewhere you could be “fixed”. She would laugh in there face and whisper a weak, “She’s not broken.”

She repeated that line a lot most days. She’d say it’s to remind the neighbors, but I think it was more to convince herself. She would talk in her sleep and say it over and over. “She’s not broken…she’s not broken.”

Soon mother slipped into her madness as well. She would sit on the couch and stare at nothing for hours. I would tap her shoulder for a full five minutes before I’d get a response. She’d walk to streets just staring at the sky. She’d seemed to have lost her voice or maybe her mind was just lost all together. She became a shell just like you had. And then I was left alone to sit in the corner and keep my sister from killing herself and my mother from drooling on the couch. The house felt more like a hospital than a home. All the neighbors said I was bound to lose myself just like them. At times, I believed them. I would stare off and wait for some crazed sense to come over me and start talking to inanimate objects.

I would sometimes convince myself the walls were talking. It was probably just the muffled sound of you laughing with the house plants from the other room. I had already put mother to sleep and you were locked in your room. I had done my nightly routine and it was time to sleep. That’s when the tears came. I had never cried about anything in particular, I was used to the idea of losing my family. I got up a lazily shuffled to mother’s room. I stood in her doorway and watched her chest rise and fall as she slept. Tears silently rolled down my face as I slowly walked to her bed and crawled in. I snuggled into her side and cried some more. She soon turned and pulled me closer in her sleep.

“Chloe,” She whispered. My name. She said my name for the first time in months.

Tears rolled down my face again and I hugged her tight. “Mom,” I said against her chest. I soon fell asleep on her salty soaked night gown. The sound of lazy rain drops woke me at around 3 am. Mother still had her arm around me and I was warm and snuggled against her. This image seemed a little too good to be true, but I let it last as long as I could. The rest of the night, I watched mother sleep. Her sleeping face reminded me of when she would sigh and close her eyes for a while. She was peaceful. For the first time in years, I smiled. At around five, she opened her eyes, and lazily smiled after a moment. I cried again, and threw myself at her. I don’t know if she even knows who I am. But I missed her so much, and she hugged me back.