Her life did not flash before her eyes                                                               

                                                                 as she plunged off 

                                                                                                 the bascule bridge.

           Rather, synapses ignited, and her mind envisaged, with unimaginable clarity, the Bridge Operator, who in those final moments had pleaded with her to come down. And his voice, like a dwindling campfire, stayed with her as she saw his life unfold.

            How he returned to a threadbare apartment on 2^nd and Highland. How he washed pain pills down with beer, sitting in front of an old desktop, typing the name Claire Fanning into the search engine.  A doctor, an accountant, a poet laureate, a wife, a mother, names upon names, the smiling faces of young women with fathers somewhere. All Claires. But not his.

            How days later, at a corner bar, he threw back a bottom-shelf bourbon and recounted the story of the young girl on the railing to the others huddled around him. 

            “I was there,” he slurred. “I couldn’t talk her down.”

            “Ah, shut it, Bill, we’ve heard it all before.”

            How every day he climbed into the cabin, staring into the infinite sky and opened and closed, opened and closed, entered and exited, exited, entered.

            How weeks after the new reports had no further information of the suicide on Wolff Street. How they said they couldn’t ID the girl. No further developments. And Old Bill sank into his couch with an empty bottle of Popov.

            “It was my Claire,” he cried, taking a swig of nothing. 

             How he grabbed a framed photo off the side table. A little girl with big, goofy glasses holding a pink lunchbox. She had his dimples and curly hair. He caressed the photo. Tracks of dust on the glass. He kissed her little forehead. Dust on his lips.

           “Do you remember me?” he muttered.

            The Bridge Operator—who opened and closed, closed and opened, who drank liquor from plastic bottles alone in the grey of night—he was the last thing she witnessed in this cruel world.

            And she saw years after, the day he left the cabin one last time, pulling his old bones up atop the railing. How he gazed at the blinking lights of downtown, and how they looked like stars, and how paradoxical it was that he would fall into the stars, she was falling into the stars, and together they fell, whirlwind and sparks, their minds shared, comforting each other until the final impact as

                                                                                                         the bascule bridge

                                                                         closed above them.

– Jesse Mardian