The Bridge

1200 words

The Bridge

I hold my breath as I approach the bridge at the edge of the world. He is moments ahead of me. The brilliant birds sing of a stranger beneath the trees. The shy jungle cats cry he has passed.

            I need not return home, the Grandmothers say, if I am not bold enough to take him, the last of his kind remaining on our world, before he crosses the bridge.

            I catch glimpses of his tawny body through the trees. The trigger on my blowpipe bulges beneath my fingertip; I raise it from my side as the trees thin around me. We near the bridge. The trees break, and he starts across the clearing, running fast and low.

            I break cover, pushing through a spiderweb covered in bright, jewel-toned drops, and shout.

            “Hey!”

            He freezes, one foot on the bridge.

            Glistening and slick, the bridge springs from the brilliant green side of the canyon, stretching into the hazy distance without suspension or pillar. Against the rainbow of sunlight glaring off it, his coloring is dim and tame. He eases his foot off the edge.

            I raise the blowpipe to my lips. The red sunlight flashes in tiny points off it as my hand trembles. My hand always trembles.

            His eyes meet mine across the space between us. His are brown, and they catch and reflect the light like the surface of a pool, all sharp twinkling points.

            I come from a race of mighty hunters. We have hunted his species all our lives. I learned it from my mother, and she learned it from her mother and she learned it from her mother, forever and forever into eternity. My finger tightens over the trigger button.

            He speaks.

            “You don’t know what you’re losing,” he says.

            My free hand flies to my translator, sitting just inside my ear. I tap it, my heart pounding—I turned it off an hour ago. The blowpipe drops to my side.

            “Please don’t shoot.”

            His voice is soft, smoother and deeper than anything I have heard before among the women in the city. It rumbles. It resonates in my bones.

            “Where did you learn to speak my language?” I demand. “The Grandmothers—”

            “The Grandmothers are wise,” he says. His body is rigid and upright and his sparkling brown eyes do not leave mine. If it were not for the voice, for the flat, square body—

            I cut myself off. He is still speaking.

            “They do not remember everything.”

            “They tell the ancient stories back a thousand years,” I say, shaking off the hypnotic pull of his voice. He is wrong.

            “They have forgotten what they once were.”

            Only once before have I hunted a creature—a tiger—with such eyes, large and innocent and frightened. I killed him right before he leaped at me. His words distracted me, flattering, fascinating words in an animal tongue through the translator I had forgotten to turn off. I swore I would make no similar mistake. Not with Man. Not with any other beast.

            I raise the blowpipe once again to my lips. My hand shakes so I can hardly sight down the barrel. The thought of killing a creature that speaks my language, that looks so unnervingly like me, sits like a hot pebble in my stomach.

            “You’ll never know, if you kill me,” he says, and I press the trigger.

            The little yellow feathers at the end of my dart never appear in his neck. His eyes meet mine, wide and smooth and no longer sparkling.

            The blowpipe slips from my fingers. I have missed. The blowpipe cracks as it hits the ground.

            “What were they before?” I ask. I can hardly force the words out.

            “We were all the same.”

            His curious voice, of all the jungle creatures the closest to my own, yet so different, holds my ear spellbound.

            “Before the Grandmothers,” he explains, “there were spacemen. They came and built cities and left ancestors. We were all the same, then, your people and mine.”

            I look down to my cracked blowpipe, lying half-hidden in the jungle grass at my feet. I pick it up.

            “Your kind always tells that story,” I say. I can hear the Grandmothers’ rebukes for the broken blowpipe and empty hands even now. Without a weapon, I realize how much larger he is than me, and I wonder how fast he can move.

            “What lies beyond this bridge?” he asks suddenly.

            “Chaos,” I answer, sliding my fingers into the chamber of the blowpipe and extracting my spare dart. I handle it with my fingertips, careful not to get the poison under my skin. The answer is the one the Grandmothers give the first time they take their daughters to see the bridge at the edge of the world.

            “Did they tell you that?”

            My answer hurts the back of my throat, so I do not make it.

            “Just a yes or no,” he says. His voice is thick and warm like fresh milk.

            “Yes,” I mutter.

            “Look,” he says. He turns and points; across the chasm, rising above the wet jungle haze, stretch five long, jagged fingers of glass.

            “They’re buildings,” he says. “Left by the spacemen who came before the Grandmothers. When we were all one.”

            I stare out over the chasm at the glinting buildings, my mouth open.

            I can’t believe I’m talking to him. Believing him. My prey. The Grandmothers would be furious. But why is it they would not tell us if such a thing were true?

            “How do you know?” I ask.

            “We, too, have our stories,” he says. He puts one foot back on the bridge. The skinny length of it begins to bounce up and down under his weight.

            I stare out across the chasm, across the mist, into the endless distance. “A city?” I ask.

            “Yes.”

            Impossible.

            “Why are you going?”

            “Because the Grandmothers have forgotten,” he says, “what it is like to be one.”

            I look again into his wide eyes, and a little hot longing awakens inside me to see what he will see and to hear the ancient stories still more ancient than my own.

            “And you will find out?” I ask.

            “Perhaps we can learn it again.” He shrugs. I wonder if he might be right, that we and Man were one in the years past.

            I look at the yellow dart I have concealed in my hand. The Grandmothers will be angry when I come home empty-handed. I will tell them that I dropped my blowpipe. I will tell them he escaped. They will be angry but it will pass.

            “Watch for it,” he says, turning back to the bridge. His back is broad and his neck exposed.

            I look at the dart and drop it to the ground. He steps out onto the bridge, bouncing up and down with the chasm winds. And then he disappears, and the bridge is still, and I have failed. Far in the distance, the fingers of glass buildings poke up into the sky.

            Without taking my eyes off them, I place my own foot onto the slick glass surface of the bridge and commit myself to the chasm winds.