There’s a stumbling, shambling figure, lurching wretchedly aside cracked asphalt, walking astride it, like a droplet of water sliding down a length of wire, the tarmac cables holding the cities together, the way muscle fibres hold bones to one another in a gruesome tangle of blood filled veins and plasma, the sights of which can be witnessed within the gnarled stump at the end of the right shoulder of the boyish, writhing girl as it drips blood along the cables from its cables and leaves behind it an indiscriminate speckling of droplets much in the same vein as the girl’s too-vivid freckles which rest below and just behind thick rimmed, half-broken glasses. Along the side of the asphalt, beyond the ditch of shrubbery which produced these curious little blue flowers which did not grow anywhere else, lay an old bridge of stone and wood construction. Erected in 1801, the bridge served the inhabitants of a nearby mining settlement, carrying over it many a horse and cart, as well as the heavily worn boots of hundreds of miners crossing the bridge thousands of times as they entered and left the mine which was never given a true title but the locals had always called it “Blessed Mine” before the number of miners returning started to dwindle and the number of carts required to haul their spoils did so as well and they began to call the mine ‘Cursed’ until there was no one left at all and the mine was again unnamed, much like the girl who stumbled unknowingly toward it and the bridge that had once- and will once more- serve it.

Sun drained through leaves of thick trees, filtering it’s brilliant radiance to iridescent choreomania, dappling the girl’s back as she trudged through the undergrowth, leaving freckles behind her, which were absorbed into the ground that surrounded her from the base of every tree, keeping its distance by the mechanism of the tree’s constant movement up, giving none the same respect to the construct of stone and lumber laying beneath a thin layer of its surface like the dust that collects on the fireplace mantle, covering the bridge which much like the structure for which it existed did not have a name but was no worse for it, having stood the test of decay and rot and the other facets of nature that are and forever will be as natural as the tree’s ponderous growth or the loss of limbs. Feet wrapped in cloth and rubber take shuddering steps across the dirt-caked wooden slats, between which lie a chasm, between which the dirt cannot hold on and plummets to the valley below, which used to be filled with surging torrents but now hosts only a trickle of brown water which smells fresh but upsetting to the girl who drips a trail of her own brown water, whose face has spittle of brown water cooked in, and whose eyes surge like temporally inappropriate torrents. There is a great crash and a wrenching of wood and the rumbling of stone and the earth and the construct of material fragments into rock and sticks and logs as it collapses behind the girl as if, having served its purpose one last time, it heaved a great sigh of relief and summarily died. The girl with no name, having crossed in time, looks at where the bridge with no name had been and breathes her own sigh of relief.