Bridge Of Fireflies

By Barbara Hall

The field is the first thing that comes back to you. In green and curves of light, the chill of wind. The line of man forming a wave in the foliage, a dog you once thought was his. Boomeranging back to you, clear and sharp enough to trace with your finger.

You like the chill and weight of him, as dull metal in your palms. A pop and a hiss. A ripple making his body stir. The flesh is raw pink at the base, fuming brighter by the breath. An albino, pulling and pumping paper white.

You rise in the ravine, pumping your legs to the rhythm of his moan. Coming to, already whole
in the sway, a starved loathing in the canticle. This is where he beseeches your belly, a sheet of ice and sunlight. Fading in and out, a film that has gone gray with time and nostalgia.

You skirt the rim of the alley, a smile on your face as you follow the silhouettes. Singing an old song they used to sing about mountains in the clouds. This is the trace you recall from your window as you go down the steps alone. Tracking his scent through the wind.

The professor drags his suitcase through the sand.

You stroke the boy’s knees, fingers working the thrust and crackle of memories out of his skin. And you remember, as if you knew him before; he stutters terrifically. You hold the words in your ear, in your palms, turning them over.

His stories come in song, snatches of something he’s thought of, mulled over a long time before. He hasn’t decided if they make sense. This is how he speaks to you, from the dark side of the moon. He hangs limp but doesn’t drop, staring just past your shoulders. A gangly staring center as the clothes move themselves.

You watch the clouds, the bank for something passing just behind. Refugees bunched into oblivion, blurs indivisible through the smell of rain. Looking out past the nearest heads. You watch them pass as backs. Two faces pushing a bike over Hotaru, through the square.

Rain drives slantwise beyond the barred windows to the streetlamps. You’re moving as air,
timing your movements to the rhythm of the dark. Learning the alleys. Using the dark. Tracing
ice along the fringes.

The smallest of them drive over the bridge, a cleft of sand, without a word. They swirl through a circle of water, a thin sleep clamping their lids and waver. Coiling for sleep, his frail arms flicker, a silence echoing as the line explodes side to side, again and again into wet ash, light. A whisper of heat blowing over the road.

You coast with a faint light into your window, falling asleep sideways from the headboard. Deepening in the center as a plate of wax, a scented trace above the shallow rim of sheets. A sky ready to boil as you think of the wind as you watch the horizon, nothing wild enough.

You remember them as something that’s been before, watching the snow fall under you, from
around your arms. Leaving itself in traces one after another where you first notice the change in the clouds then in the grass, a fog over your window, moving through you as orange cotton, an agreed upon beauty that would’ve been ridiculous wih your head down.

You taste it first as dust, a fear swinging out to strike your head on the wall, leaving you there as something discarded, cinching the rope, in the water, a wall of wet leaves. The smell of wet fur. You can’t begin to see. You hug your arms to your chest, waiting, waiting and shouting. Rising up to meet the sound, then hands, then light. A great many drums beating a silence deep and wide. Breathing. A sonogram of heavenly bodies through the trees.

These are the hours of growing old, of heat and dense light. When it hurts to look over the stretch of bridge. A wind slips through the corn, across her hair until she walks sideways. Weaving through the curtains to the door. A chill tickling your neck. You idle there, watching green rain, a tiny bird you once dreamed about.

See the ice in the trees and panting old men beneath the surface. You knew what you knew, you want to say, but they went flying for the children under the trees. They glow in the soft bowl, running and then the light is gone. Babies suckling the empty air for milk.

This is what it’s like when the weight leaves, disappears as an exact payment, a stale dance of ritual twists and turns. Blinking in the slanting rain. The light and memory of heavy thighs slipping into a darkened oblivion, melting to a golden green in the corner of your eye.

You see this from afar, a lens contracting over the bridge into the stream of lights heading towards Tokyo as shadows enlarge and contract, becoming something outside of themselves. A flash of golden brown again the single flame, a fire without scent flashing on his hair its own sort of aroma, the rhythm of time and space turned to pears and fires among the metal rafters.

You hang your shirt, a sheet in the breeze, white ash and rain water seeding at your feet. Blown to ash calling itself back into a puff of heat in your memory alone. A blank face holding his shirt bunched to his leg. A boy of two faces.

He holds the jacket to his stomach, digging in the pocket for a pair of matches. Snatching
dogwood branches from their branches. Blue flame plays from a luteous stem. Over street light
and mortar, you follow his murmur from three miles away, fragrant and bone dry. Drifting into
the shade, wild and unchanged.

You stretch your arms, under a field spiraling in smoke. Somewhere a truck plays ’Sukiyaki’ as the tableau darkens.

There is no light, only the settling settling as they pace, catching him as a flash, a blur of heat behind the lens, into oblivion. Twisting into a V -angle the churning spiral of dust motes.

Through the holly. A trail of blood long since browned in the sun.

The image defines itself in the well and you make out the shape. A hand and a head, a line of wet rope hitching a ride on your organs. Now you know. Your chest starts again, a pump too
intricate to decipher, in the womb knits a sound, a kick of arms and legs, your own baby Jesus resembling nothing so much as a satellite map of nowhere.

Barbara Hall is a writer and missionary with an ongoing interest in all things Japan. Her works have appeared, or will appear, in: The Shine Literary Journal, The Legendary, Full of Crow Quarterly, and 6 Tales. She lives and writes in a small town in South Carolina