A story about a bridge

Standing alone in the dark, brittle and bleached, the old structure still allowed safe passage over Willup Creek. It's reliable fingers plunged down, perpetually testing the tepidness of the waters. Headlights would crawl across it's splintering beams less and less frequently as the night spooled past. Cars that carried strangers, lovers, dreaming children, quarreling parents; It's shivering timbers supported them all alike.

The sweethearts who stole kisses below it's weathered canopy would etch their epithets into it's beams. And each scribe would step back with their pocket-knives, absorbing all those letters and hearts, the cluster of identities, and feel a ring of guilt. Smooching here, below their vandalism, would no longer feel so secret or spontaneous. One small act of graffiti had amputated that small piece of youth, whittled it off with a dull drug-store edge.

Occasionally the vibrations of tires would shimmy a knot from it's hole, releasing it to plink into the ripples like some old fashion bobber. Damsel flies would use it as an island, a ship, as it bumped it's way along the water path, eyed by fish and craw-dads, eventually to sink or rot or be swept beyond what could be imagined. Tiny bits of a bridge whose sole purpose was to be solid and stationary, immobile, would drift off on epic adventures.

And the night that it collapsed, sending all those planks and lumbers to join their departed parts, all those carved proclamations of love and fidelity to rush into the blue, it was vacant. The next morning people of the community gathered to view what wasn't there. They looked at the hole in the road leaving air over the maw of the river. They looked at the air and thought private thoughts. And while it was agreed that the bridge had obviously been an antiquated bit of unsafe infrastructure, it was missed.

An industrial grey overpass replaced it, sturdy and uninspiring. The only bits of itself to break loose were pebbles that would plummet into the sediment to be buried and forgotten. The only graffiti it would accept came from an aerosol spray-can, the passionless mischief of hooligans. Most folks found themselves taking the long loop to town. When they looked at the new concrete fixture, all they saw was a hole. All the imagination and fallibility had washed away.