The Bridge, part 3

III.

Mike shook his head at the report card. Grades like this meant there would be a conference, concerned parents and a bland-faced guidance counsellor, but he tore the paper up anyway and tossed it. He had been one of the smart kids, once. In fourth grade long division had come so easy that he computed cascades of numbers and remainders while his classmates raised their hands. His teachers and parents had looked at him like they had a secret, but since he was so bright he knew it, too: he was going to do fine. Now Mike had difficulty remembering simple things. When asked on Monday about his weekend, he struggled to recall, then lied. When the door burst open and Taylor entered with her own piece of mail, Mike could not remember if he was supposed to be expecting her.

The Bridge, part 2

II.

Watching somebody die was easy. Finding the footage was hard. Mike started out by typing queries into search engines. The results thrilled him, but he couldn’t click. He hovered over the links, then wiped his search history and turned off the monitor. Soon he began to click them. First images, crime scene photography of murder victims and human roadkill, washed-out pictures depicting punctured bodies, bruised necks, pulpy skulls. The flash glistened on bone and brain, and Mike couldn’t stop clicking. Page after page: a boiled man in a tub, skin flayed and red muscle exposed, marinating in some thick purplish liquid; an Indian man with an axe standing unsupported in his skull, a lobe of blood across the linoleum; the drowned child’s blue and swollen cheeks. It was exciting, but it wasn’t enough. Corpses were oddly peaceful. They were past motion, past pain – they couldn’t hurt and so they could not hold Mike’s attention for long. He began to dig deeper through poorly designed webpages, found illicit webrings where connoisseurs could gather and trade their videos. At last he found a plain page, green text on black background, with a list of thrilling titles: “girl headshot”, “paki execution”, “train hit”, “jumper”.

The Bridge, part 1

I.

If Taylor Holmes jumped off a bridge, would you?

Mike stood at the railing, seventeen and scared as hell. The water, a long way below, ran black and fast. Moonlight glinted on its surface. Taylor reviewed a few last points of safety.

“Now you have to go in feet first, and keep your legs together, tight as you can. Plug your nose, and maybe bend your knees a bit – if you go in with your legs straight you might break something. Okay, Mike, are you ready?”

A car zipped by, harsh glowing headlights bringing to mind a hundred movies, vague feelings of pursuit. “No,” he said.

“Aw, come on.”

“Is it dangerous?” he asked. Tina Haupt had been the last to answer that – Mike remembered driving past the wreath. If you aimed to kill yourself, you couldn’t pick a better spot than this, where the winds came whipping off the river and you could swear the thing shook beneath your sneakers. But what if your only aim was to impress Taylor Holmes, maybe find out what it was like to kiss those lips, so vivid red they might signal poison – was this the place?