The City From a Bridge, by Robb Todd
I dove into piles of leaves in a park because it was my last chance before the snow and if my friend and I were going to enjoy the city properly on the holiday, unbound from obligation and other people, we had to do whatever everyone else was not doing.
Birds flying in flocks circled above the streets and between buildings, black outlines against a bright, clouded sky, and they landed on ledges and rested and did the same thing over again.
My friend and I walked across a bridge into another state to see the city moving slowly on a day most people stay indoors with their family and open presents that have been stacked under a tree with blinking lights and strands of silver. There were memorials on the bridge for a boy who jumped and newly erected suicide prevention signs. On the other side, I took a photo of the bridge and another of a sign that said “CAMERA USE PROHIBITED.”
The best thing about the other state is the view of the city we came from and we walked through a park and stood on a rocky ledge on the other side of a fence we were not supposed to climb and we watched boats float down the river. There was hopeful, corny graffiti on a rock: “I’VE SPENT ALL MY LIFE IN SEARCH OF YOUR LOVE.” Broken glass, empty drug baggies, and ancient beer-can pull-tabs littered the ground. Stay-tabs, which are on every canned drink now, replaced pull-tabs decades ago. There was a party on this rock before we were born and we were not invited. A whitetail deer with tiny horns stepped out from behind a tree just a few feet away from us. My friend chased it.
We walked back across the bridge into the city and saw an old woman drop a wrapped gift out of a fourth-floor window to a young woman on the sidewalk. The young woman unwrapped the present and threw the colorful paper on the ground and it blew across the street. We walked past the building and my friend held out his hands like he would catch a gift if the old woman tossed one and she laughed and smiled. We walked through a neighborhood we had never seen before, past a building surrounded by flashing fire trucks, and into a park with frozen waterfalls.
The path home was down a steep wooded hill and it was covered with thick ice. A tangle of red plastic tape that said DANGER and DO NOT ENTER was frozen inside the ice with brown and gold leaves. We decided the best way to get down was to run as fast as we could and dive face-first onto it and slide to the bottom. That plan did not work very well.
We were hungry when we reached the bottom and not much was open because of the holiday. My friend called a pizza place and the guy did not speak English well but he was able to let my friend know that they were open.
“Yeah, we open three-sixty days a year! Delivery?”
“No, we’ll come there.”
“Delivery?”
“No.”
“Okay, I wait here.”
Corn pizza for dinner—do not doubt it. We ordered a beer but he shook his head. While our slices melted, we went to a deli and brought back a six-pack imported from his country. We gave him and the other guy behind the counter a couple bottles and their smiles did not need translation. They gave us brown paper bags to drink out of and after we finished our slices, they also gave us free pasta and garlic knots. We were stuffed and took it to go. We gave them our last two bottles and he invited us to ring in the New Year with him at a cantina nearby.
Snow floated in the next day, early in the morning, like a sifting, and the dark hill framed by my window slowly turned white behind the twisted black veins of barren branches and the wind rose and the snow got bigger and did not stop.
