59 Glass Bridges

by Steven Peters

  “There’s no conductor,” I whisper.

  Willow nods. We stand and watch the ghost train as it rushes beneath us. I strain to catch sight of someone—a driver, a passenger, a would-be boarder (though the train never stops). I still don’t see a soul.

  Then Willow crosses the bridge and I follow, my anger snuffed in the wake of this strangeness.

  Our new building immediately disorients me, so thank god for Willow’s guidance. From the moment we step off the bridge, we seem to be walking on the walls.

  A cork paneled ceiling runs to our right, a linoleum floor to our left. Then the hallway corkscrews sickeningly—the walls, ceiling, and floor all twist around this corridor as we walk.

  One moment, I feel like I’m on solid ground, but in the next I’m stepping over artwork hung on the “wall” underfoot. I hesitate at the first painting in my path, a distorted portrait of someone I don’t recognize. Willow treads on it without checking her stride. Supposing that she knows best, I follow suit.

  My guilt vanishes after the first few paintings, and then I discover perverse pleasure in defacing art that I don’t understand. I even take exaggerated care to scrape my heels across a painting of multicoloured squares and another of people melting into shades of green.

  I keep my gaze lowered and focused on the art, lest I suffer another bout of vertigo from this twisting hallway.

  I look up from my defacement to see Willow looking back at me, a crooked smile on her lips. I realize, suddenly, that the painting she is standing on doesn’t display her footprints at all. I then remember her silent footfalls. I remember that she’s a ghost. Which means—I look back—all the defacement’s been my own.

  “There’s another bridge ahead,” Willow says. “And I have one more thing to show you.”

  I skirt around the last few paintings on the floor.

  This bridge has glass walls and a pyramid-shaped skylight in its centre. It looks out over a city street very similar to the last, though we’ve left the train tracks behind. I stare at the zebra striped crosswalks and the cracking pavement. All devoid of people, once again.

  Willow tells me to look behind us. The corridor we’ve just left looks normal now, and I can’t comprehend the illusion. But Willow shakes her head and redirects my gaze outside, to the building that houses the hallway we’ve just emerged from. The building isn’t there.

  A dusty yellow plot, with the first signs of a building’s foundations, lie directly below the corridor we’ve just left. A crater bites deep into the earth, waiting to be filled with subterranean parkades or concrete basement levels. A web of stiff orange plastic separates the building-to-be from the sidewalks and streets surrounding it—a gesture that strikes me as unnecessary, given the lack of pedestrians.

  “I can’t explain it,” Willow says. “At least, I can’t explain it any better than I can explain where we are. Not to your satisfaction. Now, look across the street. A block to the south, there’s another bridge.”

  I do as she says. The bridge in question is massive. It’s no longer than the one we’re standing on, but it’s three times taller—three separate bridges stacked on top of each other.

  As I gaze across the block, I’m suddenly aware of a figure standing on the bottom layer. It seems to be staring back at me.

  “Oh shit!” I shout, stumbling away from the glass.

  Apparently startled by me as well, the other figure does the same. “Willow,” I hiss. “Look! The Minotaur!”

  Willow says nothing. She’s watching me. I lift a hand to show her, in case she can’t see this other person … and then I notice that the other figure, still sitting on the ground like I am, does the same. I lift my other hand. My doppelgänger copies the action.

  “It’s us,” Willow says. She points up, to one of the higher bridges, and there I notice the second figure. She’s significantly harder to spot—she’s almost completely translucent—but sure enough, this figure mimics Willow’s actions exactly.

  “What the fuck?” I ask. Then I rephrase, “Another illusion?”

  Willow snorts. “What makes you think any of this is illusory? There you are. There I am. We’re staring at us, staring back at us.”

  “I don’t understand. Never mind twisting hallways and snow globe cities and ghosts, for that matter. That … other you, must be thirty feet above us. But the other me is directly across. If it’s us, why are we standing on different levels?”

  Willow waves a dismissive hand. “Different angles, looking at the same thing.”

  “This isn’t a mirror,” I say, my voice rising again. “We’re separated by more than perspective!”

  Willow doesn’t rise to my shout. Instead, she reaches out and takes my hand. My doppelgänger, and hers, both reach out and clasp the air beside them.

  “I don’t understand,” I repeat.

  We stand like that, for a time. Though I don’t admit it, I’m suddenly very happy for my guide. I’m clearly out of my depth. I feel her fingers press into the wound on my palm, and I’m reminded of the copper slide and my flight from imagined hooves.

  “I’m holding your hand,” I say.

  Willow laughs. “Your first time?”

  “No, that’s not what—” my tongue trips on itself, “You—I mean, earlier, you put your hand on my shoulder. You hugged me. And now we’re holding hands. But before, when I—”

  At a loss for words, I demonstrate my problem by sticking my arm through her stomach

  “Ah, I see.” Willow unhooks her hand from mine, and then sticks her index finger through my shoulder. “Don’t worry. My ghostly powers are still intact. I can turn them on and off, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “It’s no harder than being in two places at once.”

  I’m too tired of riddles to ask anymore, so I don’t protest when Willow takes my hand again and leads me down the length of the bridge.

  She’s smiling and, despite myself, I smile back.

  I look across the street and watch our doppelgängers walk across their respective bridges, on their separate storeys, each with their arms outstretched, holding hands with no one.

  • 21 •

  MY GRANDMOTHER FOUND ME HUNCHED OVER in the dark, my head down, and my hands on my knees. She admonished me for breaking bottles, but I didn’t hear her, absorbed as I was in my corner of the cellar. I didn’t realize she was there at all until I felt her wrinkled hand running through my hair.

  “Hobby owls,” my Grandmother said. “How many chicks do you count?”

  “Five,” I answered, my voice hushed in reverence.

  “Did you touch them?”

  I shook my head.

  “If you touch them, they will die.”

  “Their nest is broken.”

  My Grandmother sucked her teeth. “It’s not your fault. They must have moved in after we bottled last year’s cider. You couldn’t have known they were there.”

  I’d been crying, but hadn’t realized that Grandmother could tell. It was dark, and she was practically blind without her glasses. Fat drops dripped from my lashes. They left salty craters in the cellar’s dirt floor.

  The small owl’s nest lay on the ground, leaning very slightly against the shelf that housed my Grandmother’s dusty jars. I’d tried to take the bottles from the top shelf, above my eyesight, because last year I hadn’t been able to reach those jars. Three of the owlets now chirped against each other in a third of their nest, but two others had tumbled to the ground.

  “Will they die?” I asked. I’d like to imagine my voice didn’t crack.

  “Maybe not,” Grandmother said. “But first you’ll show me your hand.”

  She gripped me by my sticky fingers and led me up the stairs, carefully steering me away from the shards of glass sparkling on the cellar steps. A long gouge traced a bloody line across my palm, where the glass had cut me. She clucked her tongue and led me into the kitchen.

  Grandmother kept a sewing kit above the fridge and a first aid
kit in the medicine cabinet, both of which she pulled out and placed on the table. She didn’t make me sit on her lap, but I had to hold my hand out as she picked out shards of glass with a pair of tweezers. She dropped the fragments into a candy dish. I watched red slowly pool beneath them.

  Worst was the disinfectant. My Grandmother made me hold my hands above the sink while she doused them in hydrogen peroxide. I squirmed as imperceptibly as possible, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out as the liquid foamed pink over my cuts.

  After I had been cleaned and bandaged, my Grandmother equipped me with rubber gloves, a large wire strainer, and a coat hanger. We marched back outside and down to the cellar. There, my Grandmother instructed me to carefully lift the nest, owlets and all, and place it in the strainer.

  The prodigal owls were trickier. After my Grandmother’s earlier admonishment, I was loath to touch them, and I burst into tears again when she sharply upbraided me. She was sore over the loss of so many glass bottles, but doing her best not to show it.

  Without putting gloves on, my Grandmother lifted the two owlets and placed them in the nest beside their siblings. “It’s a Grandmother’s touch,” she told me. “They’ll be all right. I’ve lifted you up a hundred times, when you were a baby, and you grew up just fine.”

  We carried the strained owls up the cellar stairs and walked them to the edge of the wood that sided my grandparents’ property. There, she had me straighten the coat hanger until we could use it to tie the strainer to a tree branch, forming an impromptu home for the birds.

  “What about your strainer?” I asked.

  My Grandmother waved a dismissive hand, “Later. You don’t like my borscht anyway.”

  I said nothing to that, but a few months without borscht sounded heavenly.

  When we’d finished tying the strainer to the tree, my Grandmother had me jog back to the house for a roll of masking tape. The first three drawers that I pilfered turned up nothing, though I’d gone through where she kept all of her pens, markers, and paper. I finally found it in plain sight, on the dining room counter, where I’d absentmindedly left it two days earlier.

  Grandmother used the tape to coat the ends of the hanger, “So the birds don’t shish kebab themselves on the pointy ends,” she said.

  “Will their mom be able to find them, so far away?” I wondered aloud. My Grandmother put a gnarled hand on my shoulder.

  “She’ll know where they are,” my Grandmother said. “These owlets are her direction.”

  My Grandmother and I sat on the grass beside each other, looking up at our handiwork—at the birds that we had rescued from the cellar floor. The sun slipped behind the woods and for about ten minutes the grass blazed orange and copper before slipping back into shades of dark blue and green. The trees’ shadows stretched out and over across the lawn and, before too long, the branch that we were watching was swallowed by black.

  My Grandmother twirled a piece of grass between her aged lips as we sat in the dark. She held my hand, but I didn’t protest. As the light disappeared, she looked back at the winking house and said that we should go make supper, or gramps would starve to death.

  I followed her to the front porch, where her distillery now sat coolly in the evening gloom. She held a hand up, “Nuh-uh, young man. The deal was first you sweep the cellar.”

  Still feeling guilty over the smashed glass, I complied without a peep. I grabbed a flashlight from my bedroom and held it clenched between my teeth as I swept up every piece of glass I could find.

  Exciting as the cellar’s mysteries were during the day, the place seemed haunted at night. The pickled cucumbers and onions took on the cast of dismembered fingers and eyeballs floating in brine. The taxidermied moose’s glass eyes watched me whenever my back was turned. I heard creatures—mice, probably, though my mind conjured much worse—scurry through the cellar’s recesses in the dark. I contemplated my grandfather’s shotgun, should it come to self-defense, but knew better than to pursue that fantasy.

  The glass swept, I ran back to the house. The long grass bypassed my shoes and tickled my bare ankles. The wooden porch creaked as my footsteps thundered across it.

  I burst into the kitchen. My Grandmother smiled at me, told me to wash my hands and set the table, and for gosh sake leave those muddy shoes outside. Supper was boiled chicken and steamed carrots, hand-picked from her garden. Over dinner, she told my grandfather all about my day’s misadventures, emphasizing the spoiled batch of cider and all the wasted bottles that I’d broken on the cellar stairs. Despite that, she gave me her dry chuckle when I peered up at her regretfully, and gave me an extra scoop of cranberry preserve.

  My spirits only dipped when my grandfather told me that I should have fed the owls to the neighbour’s cat.

  That night, after my grandparents had tucked me in and the house resumed its usual late-night creaking, I quietly climbed from my bed. I tied my blanket around my throat like a cape, clutched my flashlight like a sword, and pulled clothes on over-top of my pajamas. The walk to the edge of the woods felt three times as long in the dark as it had during the day, but the stars shone bright above me like so many bits of broken glass.

  I shone my flashlight’s beams through the trees like a searchlight, until at last it caught on the steely surface of Grandmother’s strainer. Having found the tree, I sat back down on the grass and watched. Though wilder, the woods seemed kinder to me than my Grandmother’s cellar, the dandelions and gnarled elms less alien than her preserves, and the soft grass an improvement over sharp, wooden steps. I sat vigilantly, watching the owl’s tree, until sleep took me on the lawn, and dew draped me like a fishing net.

  • 22 •

  “WHAT’S GOING ON?” I ask Willow, when the walls of our corridor fall away to either side.

  Willow claps her hands. “We’re nearing the river!” She turns around to face me, and when she does thereA breeze ripples the hair on my bare arms. I chalk it up to air conditioning, despite the smell of river water it carries’s a silver flashlight in her hands. Where in the world did that come from?

  She flicks the beam on and shines it up, to shadow the features of her face. “Make each word count.”

  “What?”

  Willow smiles into the beam of light—a fireside trick for looking creepy. But she’s already a ghost. The beam of light erupts through the top of her head.

  The room in front of us, if, indeed, it is a room, is dark. For a moment I think we’ve stumbled outside, but the unseen ceiling overhead—for there must logically be a ceiling—is starless, and I’d seen the sun’s reflection less than an hour ago.

  It’s daylight, out of doors. Or maybe it’s raining, I’m not sure. But this room yawns black before us.

  A breeze ripples the hair on my bare arms. I chalk it up to air conditioning, despite the smell of river water it carries.

  Willow moves forward eagerly, her steps half-skip and half-run. I watch her light bobbing ahead of us in the gloom as I walk, so I’m caught off guard when suddenly my feet sink into the floor.

  I squawk and go tumbling to the ground.

  Willow laughs and skips back to me. She holds the flashlight up, shines the light down where I’ve tumbled, and shows me what I’m walking on. I’m sitting in a fine, grey sand.

  I stand up and brush myself off, staring at the ground beneath me. “Are we in a construction site, then?” I ask her, but Willow shakes her head.

  “We’re nearing the river,” she repeats. “Which reminds me, you don’t know any nursery rhymes do you?”

  “I—what?”

  “Nursery rhymes. Sing-alongs. Any snatches of song or verse, from when you were a child.”

  “Like ‘Ring Around the Rosie?’”

  Willow shines the flashlight up, so that I cannot miss the sour expression on her face. “That’s a little dark, don’t you think? I mean like ‘One, Two, Three, Four, Five.’”

  “I know Little Bo Peep,” I say. “I know Little Miss Muffet.” I know a few others
besides, but I don’t see how they’re relevant.

  Willow hesitates for a moment, and I can’t see her expression—she’s shining the flashlight in my face.

  “Take off your shoes,” she says. “They’re hanging in shreds anyway and there’s no sense getting sand in them.” The flashlight bobs as Willow kneels to do the same.

  I take her advice, tie the laces together, and then swing my sneakers over my left shoulder. “If we’re near the river then we must be outside.” I make it a statement, but there’s a question in my voice as I stand up and dig my toes into the cold sand.

  Willow’s light begins bobbing away again, down what feels like a beach. “Maybe?”

  “Has someone in your snow globe built a building that houses an entire river?”

  “Um. Well, we’re indoors. Kind of. But there is a river, as I’ve said, followed by a train, and then a wood, which is always the hardest part.”

  “You mean like an atrium. Or a park.”

  “I mean a wood. A thicket. A forest. To Grandmother’s house we go.”

  No, I think. Not anymore.

  “But enough of that,” Willow says. “The next bridge lies just ahead. It’s a little different, which is why the rhymes are important. Rhymes with water are better, but I suppose your little women will have to do. See if you can’t think of more rhymes over the next few minutes.”

  Willow stops, and her beam of light fixes on my face once more. She says, “The boatman expects a song.”

  • 23 •

  WHERE I THOUGHT TO FIND A BRIDGE spanning a mighty, rushing river, there is nothing but an expanse of dark water eeling between two grey shores. The water moves sluggishly as Willow’s light flits over its surface, but she giggles delightedly all the same. She tosses the flashlight onto the beach, where it sticks up from the sand like a miniature lighthouse. I hear her laughter bound away into the dark and then I hear the splash of river water.

  I slide down the same dune more cautiously and I stoop to pick up the light where she let it fall. The shore’s grit is cool against my bare soles, but stings as it probes fresh blisters. Despite my sore feet and Willow’s exuberance, I’m reluctant to touch the water.