The moon swelled like a pumpkin, fat and orange in the sky. We ate pan-fried trout that night and spit the bones into the fire.
After dinner, my Grandmother told me that she would show me how to wash pots and pans without falling into the river. I knew how, I thought, but followed her anyway.
The white stars speckling the black sky overhead mirrored the dandelions that dotted the grass. The night was warm, so I kicked off my shoes for the walk. I could still feel the sun-baked earth cooling beneath my feet.
My Grandmother led the way with a flashlight, while I carried our three dishes and a pot smeared with canola oil and scales. She stopped me on the way to the water only once, to point out two pairs of glowing eyes on the far side of the river. Fawns out for a midnight stroll.
On the north side of the peninsula, where the water was shallow and calm, my Grandmother knelt low to the ground and set down the pots and pans. I held the flashlight over her head, while she began to rinse the utensils with river water.
But in her attempts to stay dry and avoid dipping her toes into the river water, she bent herself almost double and braced her feet on slime-slicked rocks. I watched her throw her arms out as she lost her balance, hoot like an owl, and then go splashing into the river.
My grandfather heard the splash and ensuing howls and came running. When he lofted the gas lantern and illuminated us on the river’s edge, he shook his head.
My Grandmother stood wringing river water from her hair, the flashlight clenched between her teeth. I sat on the ground beside her, roaring with laughter.
My Grandmother kicked me gently in the ribs. “Well, worked didn’t it? I led by example. Now you know how to wash dishes without falling in.”
My grandfather snorted. He led us back to camp and handed my Grandmother a towel. She stripped down to her underwear and rotated her sopping clothes like a rotisserie above the fire. Our fireside songs were accompanied by the sounds of her cursing and slapping away at mosquitoes.
When she’d warmed, my Grandmother brewed us all another cup of coffee. I drank it black to look grown up, though the taste was bitter and the caffeine strong. Long after my grandfather turned in for the night, my Grandmother and I stayed up to watch the stars, listen to the river, and laugh about old ladies falling in.
• 28 •
THE BOATMAN NOTICES MY SILENCE and discomfiture. “How many strawberries,” he probes me, “grow in the sea?”
I ignore him, but Willow comes to my rescue, “As many red herrings as swim in the wood.” Willow returns to staring into the boatman’s flames, her hands on her knees. She hums a tune I don’t recognize.
Lank seaweed dangles from the boatman’s fishing rod as he plucks it from the water, only to stick the pole back in again. There are no other signs of life—no mosquitoes or black flies, no minnows in the deeps, and no waves churning these waters.
The boatman tries again, later. Not a question, this time, but a challenge: “Pretty little goldfish,” he sings at me, “never can talk. All it does is wriggle when it tries to walk.”
When I stay mute, he champs off the end of the grass clutched between his incisors, and the pale stalk falls down to blemish the dark water. I take it as a sign of his frustration and grin to have thwarted him.
Unfortunately, as the far shore finally comes into view, his rhyme proves oddly prophetic—I attempt to stand up on the barge, and then I do, indeed, flop back down to wriggle on the deck. As quickly as it had evaporated, the boatman’s grin returns, and then it splits into pealing laughter.
The far shore is no true shore at all, but a wall rising from the water. I’m hypnotized by its approach, rising like a mountain of grey through the darkness. A dim light partially illuminates the wall, though I cannot find its source. The top of the cliff—if, indeed, there is a top—is lost in the starless gloom overhead.
The boatman steers his vessel straight towards this wall, and I wonder where he plans to make berth, or how one would scale a cliff like that. The cliff is bone dry above where the river knives off its bottom in a horizontal black line. No waves ever crest these waters.
I’m eager to be off this barge and away from this river as soon as possible, even though the boatman is the first human being I’ve seen in days.
If all the maze’s denizens are like him, and the figure lurking beneath the bridge, maybe I’m better off alone.
I become aware of a small light on the wall, as the boatman poles us forward. A single light illuminating a white dock, which looks similar to the one we disembarked from. I stand up again as our boat pulls level with the dock, eager to be rid of the boat and our host, but the boatman stands up with alarming speed to block my path.
The hand that he holds in front of my face is dark and weathered, and lacking its pinky and the adjacent ring finger. The skin around the missing fingers is glossy with old scar tissue, stretched tight where it has grown over and forgotten the missing digits. Why did you let it go? Willow had sung to him on the far dock. Because it bit my finger so.
“Master’s fiddled his river stick, for dame and doodle doo,” he creaks. “Now time to pay their due.”
I notice that Willow still clutches her bouquet of crabgrass, and I half expect this to be some obscure form of currency, but instead she surprises me by lifting her free hand to her face and unhooking the earring from her left ear. As it passes from her hand to the boatman’s, I recognize the jewelry. Jade, like my Grandmother used to wear.
The boatman, all gap-toothed smile, tucks the earring deep into his pocket, while Willow walks past him and onto the dock. I move to disembark once more.
“Tsk, little dickybird.” The boatman looms over me. He’s a monster at eight feet tall. His smile no longer looks friendly, and all of his remaining teeth are bared. “No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold.” At the word ‘steal,’ the boatman jabs a long finger into my collarbone once again. I recoil back against the bulwark.
“L-little Bo Peep has lost her sheep….” I stammer out, and the boatman’s laugh is cold.
“I think not, lambkin. Perhaps you’ll stay with me? Every denizen of this labyrinth is lonely and I never set foot on the far shore.”
I look pleadingly at Willow, but she sniffs and looks away. My mouth hangs open—abandoned again! Really? Willow doesn’t make a move towards the boat and she doesn’t offer up a rhyme to free me.
I trip backwards, sprawl to the floor of the barge, and as I do my pocket jangles. I’d forgotten entirely about the trinkets I’d found early on. I proffer up the nickels to the boatman and his laughter abruptly ends.
Coins clutched between long fingers, the boatman lids his eyes and smiles down at me. He makes no move to stop me as I leave from his raft this time. Only my shaking legs betray my confident departure, but I still hear him chuckle as I lean down and steady myself against the clammy, white planks.
“What else?” Willow shouts.
“What do you mean ‘what else,’ that’s all I have!” I shout. But when I look up at Willow, she’s gazing over my head, back at the boatman, who is already poling silently away.
He frowns at the demand, but stops his raft all the same. Then he grins and holds up his hand with three fingers. One by one, he folds them.
“For you,” he says to Willow, “Cut thistles in May, they’ll grow in a day. Cut them in July, then they will die.” Willow goes even paler, if that’s possible.
“For the other,” he says and turns to me. “The girl in the lane, that couldn’t speak plain. The man on the hill, that couldn’t stand still.” I shrug.
My reaction doesn’t bother him. His grin widens as he lowers his final finger.
“And for the two of you together: up and down the staircase, as you have done before. Go in and out the window, as you have done before.”
Willow, still gripping my hand, turns her back on the river and leads me away.
• 29 •
I CONFRONT WILLOW ON THE WHITE DOCK,
too angry to realize that—for the first time—I dig my fingers into her arm, to prevent her from leaving.
“Okay, what the fuck was that!”
Willow looks at me, her mouth downturned, her eyebrows knitted together. “‘Mother, may I go out to swim?’ ‘Yes, my darling daughter,’” she says, so quietly that I can hardly hear the words. “‘Fold your clothes up neat and prim, but don’t go near the water.’” She looks me in the eye. “You overpaid, but otherwise you did well.”
“Enough with the goddamn rhymes, what was that?”
Willow places her palm flat against my chest, halting me. Her lips curls. “Okay, first, stop swearing. Second, stop bitching, or I swear to god, I’m going to punch you in the nose, and you are so not going to win a fight with a ghost.”
Willow sinks her arm through my fingers, then solidifies her palm enough to smack my shoulder.
“Third, learn to fight your own battles. You handled the boatman just fine. How do you expect to make it out of here intact if I’m always playing Superman to your Lois Lane?”
“I—you’re Superman?”
“Trust me, I’m the hero of this story.”
“Enough,” I say through gritted teeth. “That was creepy as sh—as hell. We were on that weird-ass river for hours, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re any closer to finding a way out.”
“And that’s why you still need a guide,” Willow quips and walks away.
She doesn’t wait for me or ask if I’m ready. My annoyance blossoms as I watch her leave, but I hold my tongue and follow.
The white dock spills into a semicircular cave carved into the wall, the only entrance that I can see in a sheer cliff face before me. Willow stops in front of its mouth and, once again, materializes her flashlight, before walking briskly in.
A dim grey light still surrounds us, enough so that I can make out where the walls meet the floor in the gloom, but not enough to distinguish anything about our surroundings. Of course, when Willow’s light glances upon the same spots, they’re always revealed to be dull and featureless. Grey stone walls. Grey stone floors.
Willow doesn’t speak to me and I read anger in her posture. Over my outburst, no doubt. Good! Let her feel as frustrated as I’ve been for days now.
Days. I hope it’s only been days. It could be weeks or months, for all I know.
My legs are cramping after sitting so long on the boat. I should have used that time to stretch out my overworked muscles. Who knows how long I’ve been walking. Who knows how long I’ve been traipsing through impossible spaces. And I’m still not hungry or thirsty or greatly fatigued, which I find worrisome.
I look at the chrome watch on my wrist. The minute hand stands poised to spill into a new hour, but of course this doesn’t tell me how long we spent sailing through the darkness. All I know is that I’m about to lose another sixty minutes to this never-ending labyrinth.
Willow and I walk on. She’s angry with me. I can see it in the set of her shoulder, the heavy placement of her feet. But I’m too wrapped up in my thoughts to care, and I barely notice when glass panes replace stone tunnel walls or when we cross yet another bridge.
• 30 •
THE FIRST TIME I HATED MY GRANDMOTHER was when she took a one month trip to Japan. She’d waved me off at the airport, but she didn’t truly see me as she pressed me into my mother’s arms. Her hair was already wind-tousled, her sunglasses in place, and the thrill of adventure burned red on her cheeks. In her mind, she was already on vacation, while I—I was forgotten.
My mother tried to make small talk on the drive home. She asked me if I liked the woods around my Grandmother’s house. She asked me if I still painted. She asked me if I enjoyed spending so much time in the countryside.
I told her the countryside was quiet. She said nothing after that.
Life at home was not quiet. My parents had separated out rooms into miniature warzones, and all day every day they picked at each other’s flaws like old wounds that had never been allowed to scab. It almost felt healthier when they shouted than when they flung muddy insults at each other’s backs.
I didn’t go downstairs to watch TV. I didn’t go outside and play. I stayed locked in my room, my mood dark. Only the school bus’s arrival each morning was a welcome escape.
My Grandmother sent me one postcard, two weeks into her vacation. She’d found an owl café in Osaka and planned to visit one in Tokyo too, before her time was up. She’d been allowed to cuddle a bird while sucking down coffee, which she described as heavenly.
I hated her more for that. How dare she have fun while I stewed in this cesspit? How could she rub my face in the adventures I was missing out on? Why couldn’t I have gone along?
“You have school,” she’d said. “And I’ll not have a delinquent under my roof. It starts with skipping school, then you’re smoking in the boys’ room, and then next thing you know, you’re fifteen and pregnant.”
“I can learn things in Japan too.”
“Yes, but your Grandma’s going to learn them first. Besides—” her eyes had softened “—they’re your parents.”
I understood. I understood far more than my Grandmother had said. I understood that she didn’t want me around either, that I was just a nuisance, that I’d spoil her trip.
So I didn’t write her back. Anger burned like a pit in my stomach. I tore up her postcard and then, for good measure, ran it through my father’s paper shredder.
When my mother took me to pick my Grandmother up from the airport, I didn’t get out of the car to greet her. I stayed in the back, eyes glued to the Italian plumber jumping across my Gameboy’s screen. I didn’t look up when she knocked on the window, nor when she climbed in beside me.
“You’re being a little shit,” she said. “I got you something.”
“You said I shouldn’t say ‘shit.’”
“Yeah, well, if the boot fits….” She sighed. “I know your month sucked. But it wasn’t entirely your parents’ fault. You made it suck all on your own. Now you’re coming back with me, but I need you to drop this attitude, or there’ll be a funk hanging over the whole damn house.”
“You left me.”
“Yes. I did. And I’m going to leave you again. People come and go and eventually I’m going to wander my way right off this mortal coil. But I’m not dead yet, so don’t sour the time we have left.”
I had nothing to say with that. I gave my video game my full attention, even though I’d run out of lives.
“Here,” my Grandmother said as she pressed a lumpy package into my hands.
“Is it an owl?”
My Grandmother beamed. “You bet your ass it’s an owl. A Shimafukuro, otherwise known as a Blakiston’s Fish Owl. Or a stuffed toy of one, at least.”
“I don’t like stuffed animals.”
“Hmmph. Suits me fine. I’ll keep it for myself. You won’t see me complaining about another souvenir. But you might want to reconsider this one, because Japanese owls? They’re lucky. And you’d be hard pressed to find a better guide.”
I didn’t forgive my Grandmother on the drive home. I didn’t forgive my Grandmother for months. But I didn’t throw away the gift she’d given me, so some part of me must have been glad she was back.
• 31 •
WILLOW DOESN’T WAIT FOR ME. She stalks ahead. Doesn’t look back.
Well, fuck that. She can stay angry for all I care.
I ignore her rigid shoulders, her angry eyes. I watch the world unfolding outside of our glass walls instead.
Outside of the glass tube, weak winter sunlight glances off yellow fields. An unbending road yawns into the east. Telephone poles jut up from the flat earth and chase the road to the horizon. And everywhere snow dusts the earth.
Though the world outside is desolate in its own right, it’s nowhere near as bleak as the boatman’s river. And yet, somehow, this is more oppressive.
It grows colder. A heavy blanket of white coats the horizon and the sky fades to grey a
s we walk. The sun disappears. We pass by signs of human life—hay bales, a farmhouse, another road—but still don’t see any actual people.
My breath hangs in the air now, leaves a vapour trail behind me. My windbreaker is poor protection from the elements, so I rub at the goosebumped flesh on my arms.
Our tunnel feels like a test tube. No exits interrupt its smooth walls. I can’t even find a seam in the glass. I look up and see a fine white powder begin to sprinkle the ceiling, falling from the grey sky.
My fingers, soon red with exposure, get shoved deep into my coat pockets, where they curl and uncurl in an attempt to grasp fleeting warmth.
I wish I’d woken up wearing better shoes.
I catch Willow watching me, her eyes narrowed, her fingers twisting the bouquet of crabgrass like a chicken’s neck.
And I snap. “Just throw that shit away! Christ!”
Willow averts her gaze, turns around and walks away. She carefully folds the grass and tucks it into one of her pockets.
Fucking crabgrass—treated like something precious. Ridiculous.
I stomp after her. I think about smashing the glass and making a run for it, but it’s so cold, and I’m not dressed for it. The wind rattles our glass tunnel, sweeping sheets of white over us. If I’m cold now, the last thing I want is to be caught out in a blizzard.
The flakes fall fat and heavy now. We’re soon iglooed within a dark hallway. The hallway occasionally brightens as a section of snow loses its purchase on the glass and slides away. More snowflakes are quick to take their place and pepper the panes with white.
Only the left-hand side of the tunnel stays a little clear, illuminating our path with a gloomy grey light. Not that there’s much to see, besides my foggy breath. The tunnel’s run straight since we left the boatman’s river.
The glass above me creaks under the weight of the snow. I wonder what it’s like to be buried alive. I suppose that’s one way out of this goddamn maze.
Eventually cold and fear numbs my anger. I’m too preoccupied breathing hot air into my hands and glancing up at the snow-caked ceiling to keep my aggression stoked. So when Willow tugs off her oversized sweater ahead of me, apparently not feeling the cold at all, I can only muster a weary goddamn ghosts.
59 Glass Bridges Page 9