by Aaron Dries
He had grown and that was exciting.
Brian loved stripping off his shirt in front of his younger brothers, revealing his developed shoulders. They asked if they would look like him in a few years?
“Hell, no,” he’d said, laughing. “You should be so lucky!”
Brian didn’t feel bad saying this. He was The Big Bro after all, and one of the many roles of The Big Bro was to put down his little siblings—or so he thought, anyway.
He took a draw on the joint, its glowing tip lighting up his handsome face. The eye of the cigarette reflected in his pupils, a dot of red. He wore his fringe long and swiped to one side and he loved flicking it off his face with a dismissive toss of the head—a move that infuriated his mother.
“Where’d you get this stuff from, anyway?” Brian asked.
“My brother,” Jenn replied whilst playing with the silver bracelet in the shape of a snake eating its own tail, which was wound snug around her wrist.
“Holy shit, Jenn! Glenn? Glenn smokes? But he’s such a straight shooter.”
“Yep. And he smokes pot. Which is fine by me.”
“And where’d he get it from?”
“Um, some guy at school. Don, something.”
“Not Don Fries?”
“Are you serious? Really, Brian. No, not Don Fries. Don—Don, whose name I obviously don’t remember right now. Shit. Don Majors! That’s it. I swear, I’m going in the head, just like my Aunt Mao. She’s…well, she’s just not the same.”
“You’ll be okay, don’t you worry about that. And besides, if you end up like your aunt, then hell, I’ll join you. She seems to have all the fun. People make her food, clean up her mess and all she does is sit around and abuse people.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess.”
“So from Don Majors, hey?”
“Yep.”
“Don Majors. I tell you, he’s straight looking, too. Tight.”
“He’s so tight, he whistles when he walks. Ha. And he deals pot.”
“Well, you never can tell. Ain’t that what they say? That’s what my ma always says. You never can tell.”
Brian took another lungful and passed the smoldering joint back to his friend. Jenn took a hold of it with shivering fingers. “You cold?” he asked.
“I can’t feel my legs.” They laughed. “I’ll survive.”
“Yeah, I guess you will. So wait, your brother let you have this stuff? Man, I was born into the wrong family. It sucks being the eldest kid; you got nobody handing shit down to you. Not clothes, not drinks. Nuthin’.”
“Um, no. He doesn’t know.” Jenn laughed again and rested her head on Brian’s shoulder. She liked doing that, and it was okay to do that, too. She could rest her head on his shoulder because they were friends—just friends. It was refreshing to know that nothing would ever happen between them; it was relieving. They had sworn to each other over two years ago that they would never hook up. They both believed that “love” aside, their friendship amounted to more than ten minutes worth of panting in the backseat of someone’s car.
“Jenn, holy hell, Glenn’s going to rip you apart when he finds out his shit is gone!”
“Limb from limb, baby. Limb from limb.”
“Oh shit. You got bigger balls than me. Ha-ha.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard.”
“What you talking about, ‘that’s what I heard’?”
“I mean, I hear things. The owls around here, man, they just gossip and gossip.”
“Oh yeah? And whadda they say?”
“You really want to know? Well, B, they say you and Vivian—” She made an O with her right index and thumb, and forced the middle finger of her left hand through it; consummating the international gesture for fucking among twenty-two-year-olds.
“Pfft. The owls in this town talk wa-aaaay too much,” Brian said, flicking back his fringe.
“Yeah, I’m sure they do.” Jenn nudged him in the ribs. “Hey, it don’t matter to me none. Just don’t you go looking at me that way, right?”
“Yeah, as if. I ain’t going after no yellow meat!”
“Oh you redneck bitch.”
“We killed your kind in ‘Nam!”
“My parents are from Japan you fuck-rag.” She punched his arm and laughed, collapsing against his chest. Their breathing syncopated. “I can hear your heartbeat through your shirt,” she said, just above a whisper.
Brian wanted to touch her, but told himself not to. Instead, he pulled his legs back up over the edge of the bridge and stood up. He saw that the toes of his shoes were covered in fine droplets of water. He looked back towards the road and saw swirling raindrops in the streetlight.
“What are you doing?” Jenn asked, craning her neck to look up at him.
Brian took a hold of the handrail.
The footbridge extended in two directions: one led to his house—towards the streetlight—and the other towards Jenn’s—among the shadows of the trees. By daylight they would have been able to see Mount Si from where they were, but now, as the hour crept towards midnight, there was only darkness.
Brian leaned forward and peered over the edge. The running water was obscured by a low, hovering mist. The wind took hold of the clouds above, and as if on cue, revealed the moon. In its pale glow, the mist seemed to come alive, throbbing in phosphorescent beats.
“When I was a kid,” Brian began, “I used to bring my brothers down here. They never used to want to come, because they say this place is haunted by some chick. They made a TV show here, too. Some show that my Mom said was real boring. And that the memory, or whatever, that she walks here, too. So we was always scared. But all my friends at school, they used to come here as well.”
Jenn shook her head. “And now you’re officially talking shit.”
Brian looked down at the mist. “One time, all my friends were here. Liam, Nathan. Rohan was there. And they all were jumping off the bridge. Right here. Right where I’m standing now. They just flew off and down they went. It seemed to take forever. But they made it. Spla-aaasssh.”
“So they jumped, big deal.”
“But then my brothers did it. Over they went.”
The wind blew hard, the trees brushed against one another. It reminded Jenn of where she should be: in bed, in her house, which lay fifteen minutes past the dark end of the bridge.
“And then my brothers and my friends all looked up at me,” Brian continued. “And they were all like, ‘Jump! Jump!’. But—but I couldn’t. I remember clinging to the side of the bridge, just frozen on the spot. Right here. I couldn’t do it. I was so scared.”
Jenn clucked like a chicken.
“Oh zip it, Pikachu.”
Their high-pitched laughter echoed across the river.
“So you didn’t jump,” Jenn said, touching his ankle. “It’s no biggie. It’s frigging high. I wouldn’t have done it, not in a million years.”
“Yeah, but I had to do it. It was important. It was important and I didn’t do it.”
“Well, B, don’t even think about doing it now.” Jenn pulled herself upright, using her friend for balance. She wrapped her arm around him and pulled Brian away from the edge. She heard the flesh of his palms squeal over the handrail as he loosened his grip. Jenn could feel how tense he was under the faded sweatshirt that he only wore around her because he was too embarrassed to wear around anybody else. Jenn dragged him into a hug and felt him relax.
“You want to crash at mine?” she asked.
“Nah, I’m okay. I think I should go home.”
“Yeah, I think we should.”
“Are you going to be okay? You know, getting back on your own?” he asked, crossing his arms across his chest. She hated when he did that; it meant the conversation was over and he wanted to go. And the last thing she wanted right now was to be alone.
Out here. In the middle of the night.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, feigning a smile. “I’ve got bigger balls than you, remember?”
<
br /> “Oh, shit, Jenn. Don’t remind me.”
“Shhh. Not so loud.” She pointed at the trees. “The owls.”
“Yeah, right. The owls.”
“See you later, alligator,” Jenn said, pulling her hoodie down over her eyes.
“In a while, crocodile.” Brian saluted his friend and pivoted away from her. He stood there for a moment, listening to the running water and the sound of her feet as she jogged across the footbridge.
She hadn’t stopped to look back.
Jenn disappeared into the dark, the trees leaning in on her, their branches brushing up against her in a way that wasn’t scary, but comforting, like the touch of kind, reassuring uncles. She could smell churned earth and decomposing leaves. There was the sound of flapping wings near her ears, startling her.
Keep going, she told herself. You’re not going to go back and kiss him. You’re not.
—But I want to.
That voice. It was the same one, which as a child, had wondered what it would be like to jab a dinner fork into one of the power outlets in the living room. It was the same voice that had whispered, I wonder what’s in that frying pan up there, the one that Mom put on the stovetop? Why don’t you reach up, grab the handle and find out?
Jenn didn’t like that voice.
That voice scared her.
“But I want to,” she said aloud. And stopped.
Brian walked across the bridge towards the 396th Street intersection. He could hear his sneakers squeaking under his weight and the sigh of the forest around him.
His brothers’ shoulders, frail and undeveloped, as they shrunk down to almost nothing. A splash and then they vanished. When his brothers surfaced, they shook beads of water from their hair. Their faces were beaming and alive. Victorious. They had done it.
And he hadn’t.
Even at that young age, Brian understood that an older brother’s role was to put his younger siblings in their place—to affirm his position as leader, as someone to be looked up to.
He ushered the thought aside and continued towards the end of the bridge. Brian looked up when he heard crunching leaves up ahead.
There was a van parked in the roadside ditch nearest to him. It sat just out of reach of the streetlight, but he could still see the make: your average, flat roof panel-van—the kind with a sliding side door. The blunt nose of the vehicle was a little beaten up, as though it had struck a concrete pillar or a tree at some point. Brian squinted; the driver wasn’t behind the wheel.
The wind blew the sweatshirt he was too embarrassed to wear in front of anyone except Jenn, flat against his back. His fringe whipped across his eyes. He felt the first flicker of fear reach into the pit of his gut. Its fingers were icy.
The same wind snatched at the clouds to reveal the moon. The mist above the water began to glow and the pathway leading to the road was bathed in blue light, revealing the man near the ditch. He stood flat against the trees. Hiding. He was short and squat, his hands clenched into fists by his sides.
The man was fifteen feet away. Brian watched the stranger step into the middle of the path. Although the short man was in silhouette, the moonlight fought against the black to reveal the white, dramaturgical mask on his face.
Sorrow; with its empty eyes and down-turned mouth.
The icy fingers in Brian’s stomach ran up his spine. He heard the notes, one by one, growing in pitch until the sound was unbearable.
There was a snapping twig just to his left. Brian swung his head towards the sound and stared into the second face, inches from his own. By the time he had recognized the expression, the hair-thin needle was already in his neck.
Joy.
Jenn was at the opposite end of the bridge and saw the two figures wrestling. A third, shorter and more rotund, was running towards them in great, messy lunges.
It occurred to her that she should scream, or make some sort of noise. Her senses were alive and her heart was pounding—so she was reacting, but she failed to make any sound, or move. It didn’t even occur to Jenn to turn and go back the way she’d come. She watched her best friend duel the tall man, could hear deep grunts bouncing off the trees, skimming across the water. When she heard Brian yell—a bizarre, girlish sound—her knees went weak and she fell.
Only then did she make some noise. It was just enough for the two men to hear.
Brian felt massive, gloved hands curl around his arms. The grip was strong—great power flowed through those fingers. Nausea came crashing down upon him, making his head heavy, his stomach churn. The needle point fell out of his flesh; a single bead of blood slipped down his neck and bled into the collar of his shirt.
Brian lashed out, desperate, and escaped the taller stranger’s hold. The shorter man dashed forward, his arms outstretched so wide they seemed to touch both ends of the world. Brian saw him coming through the waves of his blurring vision and stepped backwards until the metal handrail pressed against the hollow of his back. It was cold through the multiple layers of clothing he wore and that chill reminded him that he wasn’t dead—that he wanted to live. It sobered him. The shorter man’s arms were now normal sized, but that didn’t make him any less frightening.
The two masked faces closed in as the wind howled and the moonlight faded away once more. Brian stared into darkness, a darkness that was without depth or volume, but which he knew wasn’t far or deep enough to keep him from the men who wanted to do him harm; the men who had stabbed him with something. Whatever it had been was sharp and glimmering. He’d seen it only for a second.
Brian grabbed the handrail again and pushed himself up over it. He kicked out into the blackness and felt his foot connect with something hard. There was a gasp for air and Brian howled, knowing that yes, he’d hit the man where it hurt and that yes, he might just get away from them.
And then the world tilted. Brian saw bright, sifting clouds, the bleeping flashes of stars. The bridge itself started to grow smaller and smaller as he fell. He saw his hands, waving in the air. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up on end. Through the new drug flooding his system, through the fear, there was a moment of fleeting euphoria.
I did it.
The mist wrapped around him like great grey wings and a moment later he crashed into the river.
Jenn scrambled to get to her feet as the taller of the two men chased after her. The shorter man—the one who had run at Brian from a distance—had returned to his end of the bridge and started descending towards the bank. She could hear them yelling at each other. One had a local accent and the other was… Southern? Their voices were full of panic. The sounds they made didn’t seem related to screams or orders—or to anything even human, but closer to the growls of rabid dogs.
She didn’t know where the tears came from but they were rolling down her face now. It occurred to her that they might have been forming in her eyes before the attack, back when Brian had crossed his arms and said that he wouldn’t be coming home with her. But all that didn’t matter anymore. None of it. The arrival of these two violent strangers had changed everything. All that mattered was that she take control of her body and get the fuck up.
Her fingernails snapped backwards, shattering into fragments as she attempted to drag herself to her feet. The pain was lost on her. Her sneakers slipped on the matted leaves. Jenn could hear the tall man’s shoes crash against the footbridge; his vibrations shot through the metal grate beneath her and up into her arms like electricity.
By luck alone and oblivious to the pain in her fingers, Jenn got a grip on the diamond grid metal beneath her and launched herself into the air. She could taste the rot of the river on her tongue and wanted to gag.
Jenn Kyoto ran faster than she’d ever run in her life; she had no idea where her energy or speed had come from. The sluggish high that had weighed her down moments before was long gone. Her voice was back, too. She formed no words, just screams—they gurgled out from inside, thick with phlegm.
She shot into the darkness and heard
her feet pounding against earth, not the metal bridge. She was on the path, which was winding ahead of her. She couldn’t see a thing. Jenn ran with her hands outstretched before her, waving her arms in wide arcs in the hope of protecting her face.
But before she could stop it, Jenn sprinted off the path and into the trees.
In all her visits to the bridge, which was so close to home, she’d never ventured from the route her father had shown her. She could remember his hand holding hers and he so kind and tall above her; the sunlight fighting through the canopy. It was a sweet, distant memory. Though her father was easy to hate, she longed for him now.
Jenn continued to run, sightless and without direction. Every step she took was a step further from where she needed to be. But despite this, she ploughed onwards, too terrified to turn back. She could hear the tall man ripping at the trees behind her.
Thorny twigs slit her skin open and spiders fell into her hair. Her hoodie rolled back and caught the stray leaves and pine needles that bounced off her face. She clipped a tree, spinning sideways—a fireball of pain exploding under her skin. Breathing the freezing air was like trying to swallow razor blades.
But Jenn Kyoto did not stop.
At one point she looked over her shoulder and saw the face of the man as he burst through a thicket, a sliver of moonlight striking the crown of his head. The mask had slipped down to reveal his eyes, which reflected nothing. Instead, it seemed they were two pinpoint vacuums, each sucking the dark from their surroundings and feeding upon it.
Silence. She drew a breath.
The ground was gone from beneath her. It was as though she were dreaming, that this was a nightmare she would wake from, safe in her bed. She often dreamed of falling, only to bolt back into reality, gripping her chest.
Her stomach heaved into her throat. Weightless. The leaves in her hoodie fluttered into the sky, only to fall after her like crippled butterflies.
Jenn reached out to grab on to something but there was nothing there. Her legs doubled up underneath her.
