DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
A horse clopped across the bridge, which evoked the memory of its birth.
A slumber in mud. Deep and timeless. Time meant nothing to the stones that nestled there when the river had been but a trickle. But now the bridge knew what time was, so it could label that concept.
Wake up, said callused hands.
It’s time to grow up and move on, said a pickaxe.
You’ll do great things, said a mallet.
You’ll do terrible things, said a man.
The stone became many at the hands of these men. Separated, reconnected, and reshaped to itself and its brethren it didn’t know it had.
Hello, said the bridge.
Hello, it answered.
The trickle that would become a river became a creek. It played its music to the bridge as it passed beneath it, bringing all manner of thing. Leaves and twigs given new life though they were severed. The bridge never knew the dead could move with such vitality. It wondered where they would end up, because it couldn’t see far. The creek bent quickly and was hidden by the trees that hung low as if to drink from it. They would molt their dead from time to time, and if the bridge were lucky, they would do it upstream so the bridge could see them running toward it as if they were its children.
The bridge only had dead children, it seemed. If not leaves and twigs, then animals.
A man with a stick upon the horse upon the bridge evoked the memory of a death like no other.
A human child. The boy had been playing on the bridge with his fishing pole, which was only a branch with an imaginary line.
The bridge wanted to tell him to be careful, to not get too close to the edge, because it knew the perils that lay beneath the mist and the mirrored surface of the creek that had grown to a river. Though the bridge tried to speak, it was made of stone. The boy sat on the edge with his feet hanging. He raised his pole like it was a sword, and it seemed to transform into that, because the boy stood and swung it and then spun in the other direction to thrust it like the bridge had seen men do across it, who had also fallen to their deaths. The bridge had been forced to look at their faces until the animals and bugs stripped them clean enough to be washed away.
The bridge didn’t want to look at the boy like that. Not ever. But it was a particularly damp season and moss had grown over the bridge like skin. It wasn’t hard for the boy to find it. The bridge felt the boy’s heel press hard and then slip. The bridge was forced to look at the boy fall with a look of confusion and fear, much like the child who had been born under its arch to a woman who lived there for some time. While that child was fearful of life, this boy was fearful of death. Not because he knew what was to come, but because he didn’t.
The bridge knew. It watched, helpless, as the boy smashed his head on the rock, his eyes looking about calmly as blood trailed from his nose. His mouth moved as if to speak, but he didn’t speak. Soon the boy’s eyes stopped looking, and his mouth stopped trying to speak. The bridge watched him decompose as it had all the others.
There were many years of stillness after the death of the boy, as if the world mourned its only son. The bridge savored the stillness, because it, too, mourned the boy.
“Nearly a hundred years it took,” the man upon the horse said.
The voice of the man and horse upon the bridge evoked a memory of its family.
When the snow cleared, they came. Men with great machines that nearly separated the bridge, stone by stone. For that is what the machines carried. The bridge recognized some of the stones and spoke to them in the old ways. Some spoke back. Some didn’t.
After a time, the bridge saw where its distant cousins were taken. To assemble a tower so tall only birds could reach it, and they did, flocking around its peak and perching upon its stones to be shooed away by men hiding in its nooks.
Many came and walked across the bridge. Man and woman and child and animal. Often, the bridge saw the same ones pass back again. It was nothing like the bridge had ever known. The boots and wagon wheels and horse hooves cleared the stones of moss, even in the damp season. No children fell to their deaths. The river widened and raced with a ferocity the bridge had never witnessed. Mist tickled its underside, where it was fine for moss to grow. And grow it did, into great beards to rival those of the elder men who crossed it.
The man and horse crossed the bridge to evoke the memory of its death.
Chipped and bowed and moss-ridden with the traffic and absence of traffic of the people who had built and visited the great tower made of its cousins. It spoke to its cousins in the old ways, to tell them what was to come. Some denied the bridge. Some did not.
Year after year, fewer of the living and the dead visited the bridge, and in that negligence, the concept of time was lost to the bridge. It lost the concept of waiting, of watching, of remembering.
The river became a stream, a trickle, and then nothing at all. The bridge forgot its birth. It forgot its death because it was experiencing it now. Dry and buckling and too much for its own weight, the bridge collapsed.
Stone by stone, it returned to the mud.
Sleep, said the mud.
The bridge did not dream. The bridge did not wake.
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