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 2nd 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. …
Jenn Bouchard’s debut novel, First Course, was published by TouchPoint Press in 2021. It has been the recipient of nine awards and distinctions, most notably as a finalist in the American Fiction Awards and the Independent Author Network Awards. Her short stories have been published in Litbreak Magazine, the Penmen Review, and the Little Patuxent Review, with an additional story forthcoming in MARY. She has presented at the Fall for the Book Festival, the AWP conference, and the Annapolis Book Festival. She is a high school social studies teacher of twenty-two years and lives with her family in the Boston suburbs. She is seeking representation for her second novel, Palms on the Cape.
There’s silence for a moment as I think. It isn’t true silence. Not here, where the water breaks against rock and wind rolls over the waves. Here, I can pretend away my presence and fold myself into the white air, and here, silence is a kind of heavy sleep, not begging to be filled, not noisily empty. So I do not rush to occupy it.
“I just want to see him,” Mama says. Her voice is faint against the wind and muffled from behind a scarf, but my ears are attuned to listening to her.
A few moments of searching fail to yield the proper response, so I settle for less. “You know he’ll refuse.”
“Just once,” she says. “Does it mean nothing to him?”…
Ben was blind from birth. His mother knew it the moment she held him and saw his star-shaped irises and pupils. The iris themselves were gray with little white flecks in them, and the pupils were (as pupils tend to be) black as the depths of space. His mother was shocked at her first glimpse, but she couldn’t help cuddling and nursing her child with starry eyes of her own, the kind that made her heart pound and warmth flood her being. The doctors told her that his eyes were completely unresponsive to light, that the problem went deeper than just their shape, but his mother insisted that there was no ‘problem’, that she couldn’t imagine a more perfect shape for her beautiful baby boy.
Immediately, of course, when an aunt told the neighbors about the baby’s eyes, the buzz spread like smoke from a chimney, and, soon after, everyone in town was whispering about The Boy With Star-Shaped Eyes. …
My job here in the apartment building is to make sure people put their garbage down the chute. There’s one of them on every floor, so there’s no excuse for people to leave bags full of dirty diapers and kitchen scraps and used takeout containers in front of their doors. It’s not only unpleasant for the other residents and their guests to look at—not to mention smell—but it also attracts roaches. And then the management company has to call an exterminator. Exterminators cost money. Call the exterminator enough, and our rent goes up. We’re all in this together.
That’s what I tell everyone when I see their trash outside of their apartment. I knock on their door, and even if they won’t open it, I know they are in there, and so I say it anyway.…
You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Tomorrow will be the last day of my life. I didn’t want to leave this world just like that. It is difficult for a man to face his end, knowing he has passed through life as a ghost. Sometimes frightening people, but mostly invisible, transparent, with no effect on the things he touched. A man both living and dead, a dead man walking, if you want to call it that. The greatest mystery has been revealed to me in these last few days. What is the meaning of living? The answer was recounted to me by a dead dog I found several nights ago on the side of the road that leads to Atlacomulco: There is no meaning; it said amid the buzzing of the hundreds of flies feasting on its decomposing head.…
