Part I: The Bridge [I]

It was beginning to become a hassle to remember names- colors especially. What was one man’s black and yellow was another man’s pink and magenta, and while in his youth he was as quick as any of his stature to claim his perfection, as time wore on he was beginning to realize how flawed, how broken the seams in the sky were becoming, and him too.

Slipping through.

It washed onto him, the water in those dark gutters sloshing and finding his toes where the filth seeped in. Holes. His feet clenched, and he watched the darkness recede like a black ocean away from him, back into the gutter where the sound of it’s draining pushed all other noises below a surface of water. They were just voices now, recognizable only as voices without faces, without understanding, like a scratching of wood beneath cotton. Unpleasant. Eyes lifted, the smoke and the smog clouding all that remained of what was, at one time, a sky; the pieces of its original, unshaken structures left to tremble in the wake of His divine expression.

The waiting had been beautiful first, poetic as most things are, but the waiting had left him bare with nothing but the movement of his fingers and the liquidity of damp breath to warm his palms. Now even that was gone, and the waiting had stolen him, chilled him and become a chore. Four days he had walked these streets, unseen, watching without eyes but seeing all the same the mess and the desecration, glorified. Never a ghost, never dead, only without material form, the messenger had, as all things do, grown weary.

This vision blurred, image falling out of place and tilting downward suddenly, and for a few moments, there was nothing but clear, distinct ache. In those instances, all things came back into focus, and he felt his hands clutch him without consent. Hunger, cold, bare skin that touched the concrete and the brick at his back entirely numb, and he was waiting again.

“Waiting for what?” Clear, all noises falling apart and fading like flames falling out, shaping into one, singular voice. The world was cut out, leaving only this, only the stench of those lost to the streets, enveloped by the black water, and him.

Without wondering, he responded, “The bridge,” with a clarity and strength that he had not expected to come from his own mouth. He watched his palms, open toward the sky, and traced every crease and line of dirt with his eyes, a ball of rage welling. Footsteps approached, even those slowly fading, tumbling into that sea where things sounded damp, not like words at all, and the black around his vision closed in, filling the spaces with darkness.