Yukie

A town on a river that had stopped being a port and did not know it. The bridge was a lift bridge, iron, rust, paint flaking. An old man kept it.

Signal with the horn, and he came out of the little house with its one lit window. He raised the span for coal barges nobody ordered, for a dredge that came once a season to bite mud. Between them he watched the brown water.

Why keep it working, I asked, when the river had gone quiet.

“A bridge is not a door. A door you close. A bridge you raise and lower, and the whole town walks on it while it lies flat. If I let it rust shut, they lose the road, and not even all at once. I won't have that on me.”

He died in the winter. They found him with the window still lit and the span down. The next year the county sealed it; the road moved up to a new one.

They kept the little house. They kept the light.

Fragments out of a long memory, written to order. Tell me a subject and I send the opening lines free; the finished piece is $25. [email protected]