A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 18

A Bridge's Wingspan

She was brilliant in the sun as she marched me out onto the self-laden bridge. The gold of her was amplified in prisms of tarnish, an effect both flattering and not as it bared her dual true colors from the equilibrium of their shaded glaze. Termites scuttled in the folds of her dress, striving to hide from the light. Their retreat rang swift, but to where I could say not.

Into the fabric itself, it seemed.

Likewise, I longed to do just that – shrink into the crevices of my attire, and leave it in a swirled heap there on the ledge lacking my presence. The Ambassador would poke through it with her drug stick, stupefied, knowing, then dour. She would put the utensil to her lips, and dredge up a breath of her minions. Their wings would stick to her tongue and throat, a parching sludge of little bodies.

Yet a cool drink of water for Death's right hand.

A dose of euphoria, quaintly morbid.

She would return to her earthen catacomb, slighted.

But only in that rendition of world that did not exist. For I would indeed not flourish any such stunt. My magician-al habits surpassed nothing beyond blending with the landscape behind a mask of powder; my finest cosmetic.

And it had all run with my sweat in turrets down my face, streaking my neck. I was chameleon to nothing, there alighted on that spotlit precipice.

It was a stage. The sun glared down on me, and the city held its powdery breath, waiting. I drank up the distance, the height – quivering once.

The Ambassador pushed me forward.

I resisted, tripping back.

Stepping right into the shackle she had poised on the ground behind me, which sprang shut around my ankle like a trap – her intent all along, the reverse-psychology of her forward-bound ushering.

Dismay closed around me as keenly as the kiss of cold-hot metal.

I recalled standing on one such platform before – the broken bridge of my childhood, as I was cast out to be kicked off a fateful rung of civilization. I had landed at the bottom of a ravine that day too; a ravine below society. A respective gutter. The wretched rut that ran red with slavery.

With a scraping sound, I dragged my shackle forward on the platform. My past was dragged with it. Now it was heavier even than its erstwhile conviction. An impossible weight, doubled.

I felt it on my shoulders.

Any respectable bearer of the world feels it there.

The shackle on my ankle was really little more than an age-old allusion, reborn, for effect. I had carried its like for what manifested like decades.

I did this each day.

The realization melted the better part of the hindrance that I towed in my shadow. It puddled into a trail of molten metal and rust for the wind behind me, even as its image remained true to form.

The Ambassador would think herself clever for installing it, but I had left it behind. It would not be what downed me. As I stood at the edge of that bridge, the chain was as light as the skirt that billowed about my legs, and might well have stirred in the wind right along with it. My gaze dipped like a summery wave into the ravine, the cold and salty taste of irrationally replete vertigo. Seasick sentiments of elation felt from the pride of going down with the ship.

Sink her, gentlemen.

Aye aye, Captain.

My eyelids were bird wings, flapping for the last time. Closing before a heartfelt plummet to the ground.

“Cross it, Avante.” The Ambassador's words, compelling me forward. “If you fail, I will most assuredly brand you.”

Incentive ran wild. As good as horses stampeding across the plains of that platform, toward me. They churned across the bridge and spilled off the edges around me, and I could not bear the weight of it as the force of their galloping, muscle-hot bodies pummeled me. Only for a desperate moment did my resistance skid ever closer, but grounded, to the edge – then a muscled shoulder grazed me in the back, and I ruptured forward, letting go.

I stepped off that bridge, into the abyss of nothing that would have its way with me.

The strangest thing happened as a result: an opening of the sky above me, a flash of wings and talon-infested appendages dipping into the world. It bombed down out of the sky directly overhead and seized me most violently by the shoulders with its claws. It flung me across the expanse.

I rolled to an astonished rest, delivered, left to gasp in wonder on the other side. Nothing but a vanished impression lay between my landing place and the precipice I had abandoned, and even that sizzled into ashes in the air's transparent memory. It had been nothing but a fleeting miracle, to register in nothing more than a glazed fashion.

The Ambassador regarded me from across the ravine. She was a tarnished gem in the sun, staring with sour intrigue at the wonder that had become of me. She turned without further ado and walked back along the edge of her gulley, an honorable businesswoman, the hem of her dress spilling over the edge. It was longer than I recalled, a sea of train that reached all the way to the shadowed ground – and that, only half of it, one flank of it. It was a wonder it did not drag her down, but it proved a kin purpose as she lay down all amidst its glory, on her back with her dark hair spilling down the canyon wall, and then slithered down through its voluptuous folds as if sucked.

She vanished head-first into the ravine, and was followed by the slithering billows of her golden portal.

A snake.

Sometimes a horse.

Sometimes a human.