The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  Fictional Forms, whispered that mocking shadow before me. “Kai?” I said, but my shadow fled, leaving me to enter the building alone.

  A clock on the stone wall in an empty hallway said six forty-five. Beneath it was a bulletin board bristling with fliers and notices. I smoothed my hair, refused to look at my reflection in the glass panel of an office door that said, Writing and Culture. My nose chafed with blowing and my lips blistered from the wind.

  The door opened to an altogether different vision. “You must be Meera.”

  Mades didn’t have surnames.

  “Pagan Case.”

  She was pale, slim like a dancer or a Golden Book princess. Her heart-shaped face and high forehead were capped with a glossy dune of hair. She wore a dark green blouse, her pale arms extended like those of a stone saint. Her smile quivered with the careful stillness of nectar in a cupped petal. She sashayed on long legs swathed in high-waisted trousers to her desk and ushered me into the opposite chair with a choreographed diffidence, some sense of being watched, or judged—or even mocked—but not by me. Conscious of not being the audience that she played to, or feared, I looked around the room expecting someone else to be there, but in all the homey clutter of the Writing and Culture Office, there was only us.

  She gestured for me to sit. Her eyes were amber, but without amber’s warmth—a lens to capture her worldview and preserve it, keep it intact. While she leafed through a pile of folders, my brain looked around, but I fixed my gaze on her.

  A potter’s wheel stood in one corner. Books everywhere. Framed portraits of famous poets, a gaming station. There was a souvenir print of the Witches’ March of 1879, a poster commemorating the Blood Temple riots of 2010—the protest that led to our final freedom.

  “Some extreme shit, right?” she said, the fiery images in the poster setting her eyes alight. “Ironic how witches once flocked to the Rim—your part of the world—to escape, quote, persecution, only to find themselves hounded to death by those Paradise fiends.”

  There was a framed poster of the documentary film about the Blood Temple: Made to Break. Another flier advertising a guest speaker from the Board of Studies: “University Quotas and their Discontents.” Notices about book readings and sculpture exhibitions, a cork board on which was pinned information about conferences, writers retreats and grants, yellowed and curling with age.

  But out of all the bewildering chaos, it was the trashcan against the desk to my right that held my attention. It was filled with scrunched paper on top of which had been tossed a slice of orange cake on a paper plate. There was a single bite taken out of the cake. The plastic fork still stuck in its pale flesh. Edible flower petals lay sprinkled in the garbage. My mouth watered.

  What a waste, I could hear Kai say at the same time as Pagan Case opened her mouth to speak—as if my sister were talking through her—and I started. Pagan reddened and began to flip through some sheets of paper. Her fingernails were varnished not quite black and not quite blue. I sniffled into the scarf and didn’t know where to look.

  “Tell me something, Meera,” she said. “Why did you apply for FiFo and not one of the other electives? There are plenty on offer in Tower Village. Day classes, where you’ll be among your own kind.”

  They’re not my kind. But that wasn’t the right answer. I tried to think of what was, to read the room as Kai could. In the end I went for the truth. “I like it here better.”

  “In Wellsburg? Hundred percent understandable. Another thing.” She paused, as if not quite knowing what to say. “You do understand that it’s a night class, right? I mean, don’t you survivors do better in the day?”

  The put-down made me flinch. Memory made the pain come again. How, back in the Blood Temple, the Assistants powered us down at night, at least where our vision and sensory input were concerned, all the better to lead us blindly into a dream we’d have forgotten by the morning.

  But not entirely.

  “I understand,” I said. “I take medication for focus.” Never mind that it was Narn’s special libation. The main thing was that it was true.

  She held up her hand, smiling. “Who doesn’t?”

  She made a note on a pad with her pencil. I sat mesmerized by her waxen fingers whose caress I felt at the back of my neck.

  “You mention in your application that storytelling is, quote, in your blood?”

  I blushed. Lara had put on her application that fashion design was “in her blood,” so I’d decided to copy her. And it wasn’t as far from the truth as it could have been—Kai with all those stories she brought back from Narn’s shed, stories that were more than the sum of their parts—Kai was my blood if anyone was.

  “What kind?” She passed me a box of tissues.

  “Of blood?”

  “Of stories, Meera. Were they true stories, or what?”

  The plaintive notes of some wind instrument came to us from a distant classroom. My mind played back to Kai on the top bunk surrounded by wide-eyed Mades drinking in her words from which she conjured worlds—forbidden castles and genies and enchanted trees and slavering wolves.

  “Made-up stories,” I said.

  What a way with words you have! Now I can see the family resemblance.

  It was all coming back now, that rapt gaggle of dusky, coarse-haired girls clustered around Kai with their too-big eyes and crooked noses, their cracked stage whispers and balance so poor, they would randomly drop out of the bunk without warning, like hatchlings from a nest. “Conjure tales,” Kai had called them, and the Mades around her had leaned longingly into any “what-if” that didn’t kill them, any “once-upon-a-time” that didn’t slam a door in their face. I was beginning to remember, but try as I might I could not attach the flickering form of the memory to the substance of the tales themselves. Hard as I tried, I could not conjure their content.

  Something like a shutter opened in Pagan’s cold eyes, narrowed in on the empty space behind me. I turned, almost expecting to see Kai against the wall with her collapsed socks and one scuffed shoe crossed over the other, so keen did I feel her (unwelcome) presence. Pagan’s voice brought me back to reality and I shamefully shivered with relief. “Stories somewhere between oral poetry, folklore and fairy tale,” she was saying, more to herself than me. “A veritable cadavre exquis and all the more powerful for being that.”

  Someone giggled on their phone out in the hallway, but she seemed not to have heard. I felt Pagan’s voice like the tip of a tongue on a spot somewhere between my nostrils and the base of my skull. She reached over and turned on the desk lamp, her poison-berry fingernails looking good enough to eat.

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I did a paper on the Blood Temples and Rim history for my sociology course.”

  “You sound like you know a lot,” I said. “More than me.” She smiled, and honey dripped.

  “Anyway, Meera. Super-cute name by the way. Actually, the quota is full, but we are intrigued by you.”

  She waggled a finger at me and I almost cried. No one in nineteen years had ever been intrigued by me, unless you counted an imaginary friend I’d had at the Blood Temple with snakes in her hair.

  “You say you’re from, let me check . . .” She flipped through some sheets on her desk. “Starving Hills?”

  And just like that, as if a stricken ship, the slice of orange cake sunk deeper into its sea of trash. Had I heard her wrong? My breath caught in my throat and I tried not to cough. My face grew hot. She flipped the page around and showed me where I had, along with Narn, clearly written my address care of the post office in Norman. But it had been inked over, a blot of indigo, and above it someone had carefully written the forbidden word, butchered yes, and missing two letters, but still, forbidden. I peered at it some more, and a nauseating realization washed over me: I had no memory of blotting out the word “Norman” and replacing it with the other, forbidden one.

 
Had I? And if not me, who . . . and why?

  “Fearsome name,” Pagan said. “It caught the eye of my superior immediately. Anyone from a place called Starving Hills has to have some stories to tell,” she said. “Which as it turns out, is correct, right?”

  I flinched just to hear it on her lips. I stared at the word. Written not in the cheap ballpoint pen that Narn and I had used, but in blue-black ink in clear but ornate handwriting.

  Starving Hills.

  Missing letters or not, Narn would never have allowed it. We were not to speak the name, nor to write it. It existed on no map that I knew of. I registered the mistake—Starving instead of Starveling—and as I did, the walls inched closer.

  Pagan steepled her fingers together. “I’ll take that as a yes. Mades can’t lie, can they?”

  What the Father did to us at the genetic level—hobbling our memory, lesions in the hippocampus, whatever—was so well known that I may as well have been carrying a sign, “Made to Break.”

  “No,” I said. “But—”

  I tried to stand. To leave. My feet couldn’t get enough purchase on the floor to push myself off the chair.

  “Can they?” Her brow wrinkled and doubt, even fear, flickered across her amber eyes. “I mean you didn’t make it up, did you? Starving Hills?”

  Please stop saying it.

  “I don’t remember,” I said in a small voice. The walls inched closer—blank now of posters and decoration—Pagan’s desk floating away from me on a sea of spilled ink. She leaned back in her chair and exhaled softly. There was a sheen of sweat at her temples, the first human flaw I’d noticed since being here.

  “Hundred percent. The source code thing. I get that at the genetic level, and at the endocrinological one, your kind is made without the capacity for higher-level cognitive function,” she extended a hand across the desk, but stopped short of taking mine. “Never mind. FiFo is a safe space for your truth. I think you’re going to love it.”

  “Can I think about it first?” I said. “I didn’t realize you’d be wanting, you know, stories from my life. The whole memory thing—it’s painful.”

  She looked taken aback. Withdrew the extended hand to check her watch. “While I totally understand, Meera, it’s a bit late for that, I’m afraid. Failure to comply with the credit point requirements for the Redress Award typically results in immediate dismissal.”

  The story of my life.

  “I know it’s a lot,” she said, “after everything you’ve been through. But honestly, what’s there to think about? We’re like a family in FiFo. Sasha is going to love you. Hundred percent. Look at those little ringlets of yours—must have taken ages to style.”

  The concave walls curled around me like a fist, or a womb, geometry of enclosure. And at that moment I did feel like a bird in the hand of fate. Except I didn’t believe in fate—Narn raised me not to. If only I could remember how I got in its false grip, I could remember a way to get out. I held the edge of the desk with my too-small hands. I felt my belly cramp, a drip from my nose. Pagan looked at me with barely disguised revulsion. And that was when I could have stood up. Should have. The chance I had to walk, to fly far away. To find a crack in the fist of destiny and burst out, broken but free of both the bad sister who couldn’t be found and good sister who I couldn’t escape. Was it the panic that immobilized me—over who (if not me) scrawled out “Norman” and wrote “Starving” (not “Starveling”) in that bleeding ink? Or was it the promise in Pagan’s rough-smooth skin, her lips slightly parted and her quickening breath?

  I touched my hand to my hair. “Thanks,” I said. “But I was born this way.”

  Narn always warned that choices make us, and they are not always our own. I knuckled the drip off my nose. The floor heaved and burped me up against the desk, the edge digging into my ribs.

  Pagan said, “So, you’ll give FiFo a try?”

  “I just have one—”

  “Wait. You’re worried about those pesky trigger warnings?” She sat back against her chair with a satisfied nod. “Sasha thought you might be.”

  I opened my mouth. She put up a hand.

  “Sasha Younger—she’s the course co-coordinator. I know the Redress info pack makes a big thing about triggers—it’s all this sensitivity hoo-hah. The college has to cover its ass. But try not to get too caught up in it.”

  “I don’t know what a trigger warning is,” I said, struggling for breath between the chair and the desk.

  She lifted her lovely head and laughed outright, that mesmerizing angle of jaw and throat. “Delicious! You are going to be a hit. I just know it.”

  The chair wobbled on the sea of ink. I caught my breath. Those stories Kai brought back from the witch—they wrapped us all in their protection. They kept us safe. From the Father, from his wants. They opened a door, and we could imagine walking through it. The problem was that I couldn’t remember them. How could I? If I enrolled in this ridiculous course, how and where would I get the stories expected of me, and even more important, how could I protect them from appetites that up until now, I had no idea existed?

  At that moment, Pagan leaned in conspiratorially and said in a low voice, “You don’t really have to remember the exact details, Meera. It’s not really your truth we’re interested in. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I like you. I do. Really. Sasha will too.”

  I nodded. A hundred percent.

  “The whole Blood Temple thing? The actual reality? All unvarnished and preachy?” She shook her head, and her floppy quiff trembled. “Nope. Nope. We want you to turn reality into art. Art is sexy. We want you to show us the abyss. We want to imagine it, feel it, without actually having to go there ourselves. Because you’re there. And we’re not—never will be. We want stories to reassure us on that point, think you can manage that?”

  “I don’t . . . it’s just . . .”

  “It’s just vantage,” Pagan said. “The abyss is sexier from a distance—right? Not too far away though, not so that we can’t feel the, quote, frisson. Like from a cute bar near the edge, drinking sneaky spritzes and wearing brand new shoes. I’m probably not making much sense . . .”

  “No.” But I nodded again. “I get it.” And the moment that I kind of did, I heard a rustle in the trash can. When I looked down, I saw that the slice of cake was gone. The paper plate was still there, some crumbs and a smear of frosting. But no cake.

  “Are your eyes actually different colors?” Pagan asked. “Were you born that way too?”

  “Not exactly, but . . .” I began.

  “The truth is boring, remember?” She pressed her lips together and then that smile was back—not exactly mocking, not quite sincere—like it didn’t quite know what it was. “You’ll be fine.”

  The walls finally receded and I could see islands of exotic carpet through all the spilled ink. There was a keyboard in one corner and a mixing deck. Framed art prints. Three dimpled, curvy women dancing naked in a circle beneath a flowering bough. It was just a picture, but the women, with their imperfections, their flab and mismatched nipples and pink toes, looked more alive than the real girl sitting in front of me. The one in the middle of the picture had her back to the viewer, her arms extended to embrace the other two.

  “Rubens,” the girl said, “The Three Graces. They’re all sisters. The one in the middle is Aglaia who represents brightness, the one on the right is Euphrosyne who is joyfulness and the one on the left is Thalia, whose name means bloom. Related indirectly but not to be confused with the Furies who were three very, quote, different sisters.”

  I found myself standing up on steady feet, wiped my hand and extended it to her.

  She stood and took my sweaty fingers in her cool dry ones, then withdrew them as quickly as she could.

  CHAPTER 4

  A GOOD BEGINNING IS HARD TO FIND

  I emerged into the Quad, emptied now
and silent except for the murmur of the fountain. Indistinct clouds hid the moon, and the maple trees agitated in the cold wind coming off the river. My sweat-drenched clothes felt sticky against my skin, and my back ached from hunching over Pagan’s desk. I loosened the scarf from around my neck. My chest rattled with every breath.

  It felt like I’d been in the Writing and Culture office for hours, but it was just eight o’clock. The arachnid eyes of the Towers across the river pulsed their twenty-four seven glare, yet over here in the old college town, darkness fell early. Stars pocked the horizon like moth holes. I was shaken from the interview—especially by that change on my application form that I had no memory of. Partly because of that and partly because of my terrible sense of direction (in this I was like every other Made), in moments I was lost.

  The campus gave way to unfamiliar Wellsburg streets. Neat professorial homes and walnut trees. Streetlamps were few and far between and curtained windows glowed a warning yellow. Go back, they seemed to say. Nothing to see here. But I knew with a quickening of recognition that this was a lie. False was attracted to false and this impression of end-of-day was no more than a trick of the light. A ruse to repel the interlopers as Wellsburg waited to return to its true form. I didn’t know what that was yet, but I heard it calling to me, rumbling beneath the cobbles from my feet right up to my mismatched eyes. Lurking in these stone-still streets was everything I needed to find. Everything I needed to be.

  Everything I needed to remember.

  That inkblot on the Redress Form flashed on my retina. Kai’s brown shoes struggled to gain purchase on the unfamiliar sidewalks. Back in the Rim, the seasons eased gently one into the other, but here, the chill of autumn was definitive and had a ragged finality to it, like someone had broken a piece off the end of the year and frozen it in time. A road sign pointed to Founders First Presbyterian Church and Cemetery. Because the sign indicated the edge of town, away from where I wanted to go, I turned back into a lane where I saw lights burning. I hoped I was heading in the right direction finally, and my mind raced back to the interview. Why had I pretended that I would be able to conjure the kind of story that they wanted—impossible stories about a truth they’d never have to live—when I had only unreliable scraps? Fragments of Matron, the way her apron smelled of cigs and instant coffee and the smear of her cherry lip gloss on the cup, of the Father’s muscle T-shirts, and how his braids flicked around his broad shoulders like the legs of a tarantula? Flying lady-bits and a blind girl with a bouquet of headless snakes . . . the interview with Pagan triggered—that word—memories I didn’t know I had, and the more I tried to follow them, the further they took me off the path. I stopped in my tracks under a streetlamp wondering where I was.