OTHER STORIES
Suzanne's work has appeared in various literary magazines, including Metafore Magazine, Please See Me, Hippocampus, Six Hens and elsewhere.
The Bridge (Metafore Magazine)
I was born marooned on that island. My earliest thoughts, ones of escape. The hum of tires on the metal roadway leading up to the bridge. The flicker of light through the latticework of steel. The spine-tingling freedom as the land fell away, and the water appeared.
​I remember the leaving, but not the returning. I guess I’d assumed the bridge would always be there, even years later, after I’d moved away.
​
But this morning, as I steered my car onto the bridge, there was a sturdy red and white barrier with a ROAD CLOSED sign across the entrance. And another, newer sign, this one flashing NEW BRIDGE OPEN, and directing me towards a wide, asphalt-covered roadway.
​
I shouldn’t be surprised. For nearly two years, massive barges have stood in the river, and on them, floating tractors and spindly cranes. Still, it seemed the new bridge had emerged all at once, like Aphrodite from the sea foam. A sleek structure with soaring twin V-shaped towers and white diagonal cables, vaguely reminiscent of those doomed trade center towers.
This new structure was taller, to accommodate freighters passing beneath. As I ascended, I could see the old bridge below me. They’d begun un-building it, section-by-section, starting at the ends. Now only the center span remained. Detached from the land on both sides, the football field-sized span stood alone in the river. The bridge, not much more than an outcropping of steel and concrete, now an island.
​
From this view, I could see the rust stains running down the steel girders, the red-orange-brown patches of disintegrating metal against the dove-grey. Funny how I’d never noticed that before. How only now – the bridge nearly demolished – could I see how rotted out it was. Like my old VW Bug, the rust beneath the floorboards only apparent after the battery had fallen through to the street.
​
I kept my eyes on the wrecked bridge, trying to recall what it looked like before. How had it attached to the Staten Island side? Where had the exit ramp been? How had it wound down the ramp and onto the streets?
​
This is how memory is. We assume that the everyday details will always lay just below the surface, needing only nudge to free them. But time erodes everything, even steel and concrete.
​
Maybe I don’t remember those return trips because they were so fixed, so unrelenting. But the bridge to my childhood is disappearing, bit by bit, like this old structure. Hidden from view, rust is eroding its joints and undermining its supports.
Soon my connections to the past will be unsteady. The steady ravages of time – the rust, the rot, the weakening of those nuts and bolts – will break those ties. Any attempt to return will be too costly, too dangerous, to undertake. When that happens, I’ll be alone, like that old bridge is now. But still, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how thrilling the leaving was, and how certain, the return.
.jpeg)
My son is here. He comes in the door and approaches me. I’m in my wheelchair. He reaches down and embraces me. I struggle to say his name, telling myself he deserves the effort. I see the letters in my mind. I try to make the sound that is his name. That name as familiar to me as my own...
.jpeg)
The brass bells tinkled as I opened the door, but my dad was too busy behind the counter to notice. The pegboard above the gift-wrapping table—the one that held the shelves stocked with gift boxes and bins of hand-made bows—lay in pieces on the floor. In its place, a shiny yellow and black rack with KODAK emblazoned across the top. It was so fancy that for a moment I felt embarrassed
.jpg)
The Ring
A cold spring rain beats against my bedroom’s window panes. The cemetery walkways will be a slurry of ice and gravel. Nothing like the day twenty years ago when we buried my father – the crab apple blossoms like snow flurries, the chip-chip-chip of the sparrow, the smell of freshly-turned dirt...
.jpg)
“Come to me,” I urged, scuttling back and forth along the narrow edge of the deck, signaling over and over to my daughter where she should be.
Charlotte [Samuels] had been in the water seventeen hours by then.
.jpg)
My father uses his fingers to pick the chicken clean: only a few scraps remaining from a roast, nearly all the parts useful. even the carcass, which he boils down to the |bones. He'll use the stock later, for a bland soup of potatoes and carrots. Once the wishbone is bare, he places it on the windowsill above the sink. It needs to dry out. he |instructs, before it can be used. If you try to pull it apart before it is ready. before it isdry. he warns, it will not work...