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The Small Bridge
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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The Small Bridge Ayoung man in a red corduroy jacket stands near a small wooden bridge that he’d built himself and placed over a creek, or what he liked to call “the creek”—a rough, twig-lined trench the depth and width of a shovel, which, truth be told, didn’t actually require a bridge, given its meager proportions, despite its serving as demarcation of one garden from another, and given that it barely filled with water but twice a year, spring and fall. Just now the creek was dry, unseasonably so for late October , as by all other reckoning it should have been afloat with yellow leaves of soft maple, with tarnished oak and gray-tinged willow leaves. But autumn had been droughty. And although for the most part the drought had suited the young man just fine, serving his predilection for bicycling—he’d passed many glorious afternoons pedaling the sun-stalled back roads of the county—just now he wished for rain. There was something sensual and promising about rain, especially autumn rain, and as he could see beyond his small bridge a tall young woman standing ankle deep in brown and yellow leaves, at pause from raking, he bargained with whatever gods might be available for a slight rain, for whatever possibilities might present themselves in rain. In Which Brief Stories Are Told 26 ) Let’s call him Will. For although his parents had prided themselves on the careful and deliberate selection of a given name for their first child, the young man had come to accept the fact that he would be known simply as Will, the single syllable reduction of a patronymic that was not difficult to say but was more unusual than his classmates or teachers had been comfortable with. He’d eventually grown tired of correcting them, of their inconsiderate disregard as to his preference for his ancestral birth name; in the end, he’d come to tolerate their abbreviation. In opposition, as the framing of our narrative requires, the young woman standing beyond the small bridge shall be named Joy, apropos of her mother’s exclamation upon the announcement at birth of the child’s gender. Had Joy been privy to Will’s thoughts not moments before, she’d now be contemplating her good fortune, in that not only was her name irreducible, but it was quite accurate in describing, in Will’s estimation, her being. As corny as Will himself knew it sounded, he had been repeating to himself: A Joy to be around. However, if Will had known what Joy was thinking, he’d have to envelope himself in the odor of autumn leaves and would have to remark how often that punk was accompanied in no small degree with memories of the lake cottage her family had owned when she was a girl. It was an attractive smell, in a way, despite her certain knowledge that what wafted from her raking was no more than stench of death and decay; it engaged a musky sweetness nonetheless. Toadstools. Leaf mold. Wood smoke. Bloom rot. For Joy, it was also the smell of sex. For the smell reminded her of weekends at her family’s cottage, and of one particular day, the day when she first caught scent of a boy’s sad semen, felt it sticky on her hand and wrist, first let a boy’s finger probe the musky closet of her gender. Every autumn since has held at times for her moments of punky sensuality, the scent of late sun and yard chore perspiration, of wormy, rich compost and frost-turned gardens, of hollow insect carcasses, and fallen pears so rotten even the yellow jackets ignored them. [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:11 GMT) The Small Bridge ( 27 Yet unlike the young man across the bridge, who might have been wishing for some enlightenment as to the unspoken musings of his raking partner, Joy would not be thinking of the person who shared the scene presented here, but of a former love, of a former time, which she often did in autumn, which autumn often caused her to do. She knew Will was there, of course, across the small bridge, or what he’d called a “bridge,” though the term had seemed somewhat silly to her, in that the step she’d taken to cross the small ditch, which (he’d claimed) occasionally filled with water, had not been...