a short story i wrote a while ago...

Steeled

She stood at the base of it all, marveled, craned her neck upwards to look at the structure that was her bones. The strong, sturdy foundation shouldered the courageous task of controlling and patrolling the amateur water that would become famous soon as it flew down the falls and into the lenses of a thousand summer tourists' cameras. Then grew the green steel, pitching to find its peak just below its purpose: a thin, horizontal strip dotted with moving flashes of light and color, citizens of the world discovering the crown of the Parker truss just as they descended into America or began their climb to Canada.

She walked back and forth under that Parker truss on the Bird Island Pier until arriving at exactly the spot where he had pulled her to hand-in-hand years ago. It was an evening not unlike this one: the sunset struck over Canada, stacking the sky and water in a graduation of pale yellows, oranges, pinks. He'd held her just here long ago, asking in his gentle voice for them to marry. He'd finally gotten a job directing traffic for the bridge, corralling drivers into lanes and lining neon cones up in rows.

It was here in this spot and in this moment that she saw herself completing a perfect circle. Her father had fed her on the steel that lived in this bridge, and she would continue to eat from it once they'd found their way out of the magical road—these half-grown bushes and trees sprouting from deep crevices of large rocks banked on the sides of a poled-in path grounded in broken bottles.

Her husband was proud of the job even as the trucks rode their way into his lungs and the time on his feet saw veins protrude and pop into their places on the map of his legs. She saw that their children enjoyed their first international experience up on the bridge with their dad, gazing up to the flags marking the line they would straddle to be liminal. She tearfully thanked her father at his grave for his literal supporting of them in this dying economy—her home where she’d wanted so much to stay, to find peace underneath the connection he’d completed building not long before death.

The sun slipped underneath the horizon and the wind began to bite its only victim on the path. Night covered the calm, green Fort Erie to her west, and the beautifully gritty city to her east. She saw life here just as if it had happened to her, now in the moment when the bridge was beginning to be overtaken by plans for a new one nobody’s father would help build; the plant had died as the men who once lived its shifts and its furloughs faded. She thought about them in her writers’ retreat far away, carefully mining for words until they weren’t her words any more but those of her father, her father’s friends, her old lover. Their voices unearthed while she saw them diving deeply and faithfully into a city that couldn’t build its own bridges. She fed herself on their promise alone, dreaming quietly, as she could only have learned to do from her city.