The Whispering Bridge

The Whispering Bridge

By Graham Swanson

For S,

Sareena Corteza took her dad by the hand. He gave her the keys to his car.

“Maybe I will give you a ride.” he reconsidered, his factory work shirt unbuttoned and cooled by the fan.

“I’ll be fine, dad. It's just downtown for work. Kylie and Brandon will be there.”

“And you will come straight home?”

“Of course dad.” Sareena thought of Brandon in the backseat of the car. “Don't worry so much. Nothing will happen to me.”

“Yes. I am taking care because I worry. You know that. You know what happened to that other girl.”

“Dad, it's not like I'm meeting up with strangers on the internet. It's just work. It'll be okay.”

“I do not think your grandma is well, she might go to the hospital soon, and if that happens and if something happened to you...” 

“I’ll come home, dad. I promise.” She smiled at him with her fat cheeks and shiny black eyes.

Her father smiled back at her and let her hand slip away. She put on her little earth-colored boots and went out the moonlit door.

Sareena shivered in the wet dusk. She stepped off the porch of her hilltop home. The moon turned bright orange as it hung over the truck stop at the bottom of the valley. Branches of darkened trees reached for the light and shivered as their leaves dropped onto her windshield. She listened to the chirping critters scurry away from the brisk pace of racing coyotes. They reminded her of her own cat.

The theater she worked at showed no cool movies. American movies about how hard it is to be husband or father. Animated movies for children and families about goofy cartoon characters lost in the big city. A movie about someone getting shot, or another superhero movie. Only old people and weird nerdy loners with no dates came in. She sold tickets and snacks, stood by the door when the movies got out, cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the floor, then they all played hide and seek. Kylie hid behind the curtains by the fire exit. Brandon hid in the ticket booth. She almost couldn't find him, but when she did they held each other tight and started kissing in the dark.

Both of them left together, but when they came to her car, they stopped. Someone sat inside the car. A shadow sat still in the backseat. A head with long white hair and a pair of shoulders outstretched across the backseat. A pair of pale eyes looked at them both.

The two of them ran back into the theater, told the manager and told Kylie. The cops drove by when the manager made a call to them, but the patrol found no one in the car. Some broken glass on the pavement, maybe, but no person. They let her ride in the back of the cop car back home. She kept telling herself, it couldn’t be. The girls that went missing, they were all someone, rich blonde girls, popular girls, why her? Why go after her?

The cop mid-ride received a distress signal. She stopped her cruiser and responded to the radio. She told them she had a 9A-90. Escorting a minor. That’s when Sareena felt her phone vibrate. The number called her came from a three-digit number, and the location was from some country she never even heard of before out in the ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines. 

The next day she went on a walk with Brandon and crossed the weeping bridge. Ghost stories about the bridge spoke of a weeping woman who lured men to their deaths. They'd look under the bridge, and see a woman in white with a broken leg, or a baby wrapped up that she held under the creek water. Sometimes she’d be naked and would offer men a drink of liquor. Either way, when she whispers to you and you look over, she takes hold of you and pulls you under.

When Sareena got home, she discovered lint and broken pencil lead in her pockets. She dug further and further and discovered a folded-up note that she didn’t know about. She unfolded it, feeling her heart gush hot blood. She swooned at the thought of Brandon sending her a love note, but instead, it depicted a detailed sketch of the whispering bridge and the creek beneath. A red arrow pointed to a small cave beneath the bridge. She tore the note apart and left it in the sink.

After work, Brandon picked her up. They parked by his house and undressed each other. Night came fast and they both sweltered on the seats, pressing their feet and hands against the fogged windows, breathing into each other's mouths and licking the fluids they spilled on each other. She ran up, her shirt ripped and her pants unbuckled, blood trickled from her vagina.

“I dropped my phone.” she told him as they held each other under the swirling clouds and watchful planets under the stars.

“Really? I was getting some weird messages from you. Are you sure about that?”

“I couldn't find it last night or today. I think I dropped it at the bridge. What did these messages say?”

“Come find me at the bridge. There’s something I need to show you. Stuff like that.”

The next day, they recruited Kylie, her boyfriend Memphis, and they went looking together under the bridge. The creek waters almost completely receded. A few muddy rocks remained covered in footprints and slime, lots of garbage because the people living around the creek lived in poverty and dealt in meth, they tossed all their garbage down the hill when their cans got too full.

Crude, artless graffiti coated the bottom of the bridge and its columns. Birds nested in the steel beams underneath. A small fire lay extinguished on the cement platform amid a ring of glass bottles that reeked not of alcohol, but of candle wax.

“I found your phone.” Kylie located it right on top of a flat rock by a blue flower and a small ray of pale daylight.

The phone looked perfectly normal. No dust. No bugs. The battery was fully charged. Kylie gave it back to Sareena who thanked her friend and rewarded her with a big hug, and then they all went back to Memphis’s house to smoke a bowl and watch DRAG RACE.

Sareena hardly noticed the text messages coming in, and she left early to make out with Brandon. She showed him on her phone all the pictures she had of herself and her cat, but on the day she didn’t have her phone, a dozen or more photos went missing. The numbers went from #19, #20- straight to #33. Those pictures had been blocked by an encrypted password. She didn’t know what it was, nor did he.

That night, when she was back at her dad's all alone, she started wondering again about the missing girls. She heard the last one appear crucified on the lights of the new softball fields. She was the park commissioner's daughter and before that, the banker's daughter, and before that the principal's daughter, and before that a young girl went out while her parents fought and smashed bottles over each other's heads, and they never found her body. The others turned up floating in the carnage swamp, hung over a tree branch, or on the roof of a water tower. But that first girl, she never turned up. Some say they saw her last at the parking lot of the abandoned mall. Others say she ran away. But Sareena wondered if maybe she had a secret that no one else knew about.

That night just before she fell asleep in bed, her phone shook on her lap. It was a set of numbers from the strange number from before. She almost fell back onto her pillow, but then she realized that the numbers fit the set of numbers in the encryption key. A password.

She entered the numbers. 0.7.4.0

The pictures began to process, and they came in blurry and dark, but she recognized the felt of her seat covers, the staples on the ceiling of the cab, the digits on the radio of her favorite song, and her bare breasts in the pink lips of Brandon. She swiped through the dozen or so photos. Each one, of her naked body and his sweaty lustful hangs and lap. Her pale exposed flesh, his red beaten skin gnashing into hers. They were taken from the windows, the windshield, even the front seat. Then the last photo came in, not dark at all, but framed in a halo of light. She saw the flat nostrils and pale eyes of a ghastly face happily peering out from a hole in the dirt.

Nebraska Gothic 3

 

                                                                                        

Written by Graham Swanson

to My Friend J

Hasel Kenny Lee used to get pulled into the teacher’s office after school. The educators moved 

mountains for her to graduate. Her father owned The Imperial Dragon, the only restaurant in town 

around since the 1980s. She was the man’s only daughter, but she seldom came to class, when she did 

she never turned in any homework.

“You're such a terrific writer! You’re so smart, you could get into any college you wanted, become anything you wanted. A doctor, an Artist, anything you want, but you have to finish your classes, Hasel.” The teachers tried to reason.

Hasel passed out onto the floor and when they tried to grab her she bit and kicked at them. She didn’t give a fuck. Her boyfriend waited outside and he had meth for her. She knew that as long as she held her legs open he’d give it to her. She hated school. She hated her teachers. She hated her father too.

All night long her boyfriend, fresh out of jail, drove her around in a beaten up truck with no back window. They made sloppy, yeasty love, feeding each other rocks and breathing in the fumes from paint cans.

“Will this hurt your baby?” He asked her because she was 7 months pregnant.

“No. It's okay.’

They made each other angry to turn each other on for more sex. He punched a hole in the wall and screamed at her. She called him trash and made fun of his shitty truck and a little house. She liked stupid men that fell for it. They didn’t care how many felonies she accumulated or that she would drop out of school later that year and have her first baby. She was a hot, hot mess with black hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Lee, her father, suffered a brain fissure. One night, something exploded in the folds of his brain, and he had to close the restaurant. He woke up in the hospital. Too much work, too much stress on a man getting older every day, almost 70 years old, orphaned in the Korean War, saw his family die, and came to the States where he made lots of money.

Girls are not supposed to run Asian restaurants, and the Chinese already didn’t like a Korean man learning their recipes to serve Krouts out in the Midwest. But he needed Hasel to take over.

Mr. Lee snuck Hasel into the kitchen one night and taught her to cook the food. The first thing he did was drag her from her friends smoking pot in a barn in the flooded river plains where the animal carcasses hang all year.

Hasel turned on music so she could work to something she enjoyed. Her father turned it off with one long finger and jabbed at her with it.

“Concentrate. I need you to cook this.”

Hasel kept burning the food and piling waste behind the sink. The old man about tore his hair out. He kept his voice down this time. His ears rang, and she gritted her teeth at him.

“fuck you, dad.” she scowled at him.

Mr. Lee would’ve slapped her, but he didn’t need anyone finding out that he was teaching her how to cook. If the restaurant next door found out, or his cousin who lived next door found out….

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. Just concentrate.”

Despite her indifference, perhaps Benzo withdrawal, she did put her brain to use and finished each dish on the menu. Her dad turned the lights on and took her to his office. He poured her a shot of whiskey.

“I'm so proud of you right now, Hasel. But you must come to work for me. The Doctor says one more stroke will kill me. He said that if something hits me in the head, or if I take a hard fall, I will die. Please. After school on Friday. Can you do that, Hasel, my love? Will you?”

“Sure, dad.”

Mr. Lee hugged her and for the first time in her life, she heard him cry. She hated the sound of it. She hated his restaurant- his sweltering dungeon. She had her own choice in mind.

Hasel didn’t go to school at all that Friday. She watched a guy named Alois cook meth in the basement of his family’s house in the majestic plains around Welles village. By the time her shift started, the party started. Everyone there let needles hang from their arms, and she let three guys fuck her, yelping and belching, fat tits hanging from their chests, toothless and scabbed, she let screw her as long as they kept the free drugs coming.

That night the Chinese man who ran the Imperial Dragon Enterprise sent an emissary to check out Mr. Lee’s restaurant.

“Mr. Lee, we’ve heard some troubling rumors about you teaching your daughter how to cook our food.”

“Yes. It's true. I can't run this place anymore. I had no choice.”

“Condolences. Where is she right now?”

“Not here.” He hung his head.

“Is it true your daughter has been in jail, Mr. Lee?”

“She made some mistakes but she’s not a bad person.”

“Mr. Lee, we’ve decided to let Mr. Zhang run this business in your absence, or you must sell it.”

“I've been the owner here for more than forty years. I’m sorry. I beg for your forgiveness.”

“Begging from a man of precarious honor means nothing. You were going to teach your girl to run our restaurant, and now she’s out there with our recipes. You will show Mr. Zhang the ropes, and then you will retire.”

When Alois got out of prison, he had lost his farm and house, so he had to move. Hasel, with her second child, Trace, a boy that Alois claimed was his, though, no one knew for sure, wanted to buy a shaded spot of land where the grass turned purple in the sunset and she could listen to the sound of the creek running in the back.

“Maybe when dad dies, we can move there.” She said. She had a felony too now. They bonded over jail and meth, and stayed close despite constant fighting. Best friends for life. They moved into an old house next to Kznucls Lodge in Prairie District- where all the old slave houses used to be who worked in his house and his farms.

The owners never came to town except to collect rent. 950$ a month for a house with one bathroom, several rooms with no light fixtures, and only one sink with running water, so they did their dishes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the bathtub.

“Please take care of this house. It's very old, and is historic.”

The landlord showed them the panels that opened to secret passages from room to room and basement to basement. Even one too small to stand- only crawl in. They had huge rooms hidden in the basement and papers going back to 1838.

Trace kept yelling about the purple lights in his closet and under the floor. he’d heard laughter as someone kept turning his night light off. Hasel screamed at him for she believed he kept getting out of bed, so she locked him in the closet for the night while the purple lights danced overhead, unlocked the door, and covered him in a blanket as he slept.

Alois drove around his cousin’s farm. He held the phone live streaming the footage to social media. He wanted to hold the AR 15 but felons can’t have guns. If they caught him holding one, he’d go right back to prison.

“He’s there.”

“Got ‘em.”

They sped up on two deer in the dew of morning. One a doe with a thin coat of fur and a younger buck with tiny antlers. They rode up along the deer in their go-cart and ran one over, backed up, turned around, and shot the other one in the back thigh. Alois cousin unloaded the entire clip and blew the animal to pieces. Then they went back to the injured doe and crushed her skull with the butt of the gun.

When Alois got home, Hasel was passed out from drinking a concoction of Absolut Vodka and NyQuil. The baby girl screamed in the crib and Alois took his “son” out of the room to show him the footage in the garage.

“We hunted them!” he explained to Trace.

“You like to hunt?”

“Yeah, they came onto our land, so we hunted them.”

“Can we eat them?”

“You can’t eat these ones.” Alois laughed and laughed. “When I was your age and your bitch mom hadn’t gotten me in trouble 'n lost my farm, I used to have a shotgun.”

‘You did?”

“Yeah, and I’d go around and shoot the cats, the goats, and the sheep. It was fun! One time I cut a cat in half and it crawled on the barn floor so I cut its head off with a machete.” Alois laughed so hard that he couldn’t articulate anymore.

“What’s that?”

“A real big knife" Alois caught his breath. "Maybe someday I’ll show you how to use one since the damn government thinks I can’t have my guns anymore.”

Trace liked to fix things. He walked around the house with a toy drill and a screwdriver. He took a break from playing with trucks outside and in to inspect the damage. He went around and found cracks in the wall where one of the bricks went missing. He applied his toy drill, it made a sound and lit up. Then he twisted his screwdriver around a little.

“All done. It’s fixed.”

Then he’d go to the sink that only ran cold water. He applied his tools.

“Fixed it.”

Then to the part of the floor where the board came right off the nails.

“Fixed it up.”

Then he saw his mom’s phone left where she hurled it against the counter during last night’s fight. The glass of the screen still shattered from when she slammed her fist into it.

Trace picked up, pressed the keys on the side, pushed his screwdriver into the auxiliary port, shook it around, and pressed the drill into a fragment of the screen, the screen turned purple and it turned on. The screen went from purple to pink, to green to orange, bright and blinding, and a burst of happy laughter came from the mic. Elated, he set it back down and told his mom that he fixed her phone.

“You got onto my phone?” She hit him over the head with a bag of sugar and pressed him against the wall by the throat. “You little asshole.”

Hasel ripped the drill from his hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage, dirty carpets, uneaten fast food, and cold pizza boxes.

Outside Alois tore the grass out of the backyard with a shovel. He told himself there would be a sandbox for his “boy” to play in, but he almost uprooted the entire yard and hadn’t gotten any sand yet.

Trace pointed at a light bulb burned out in a lamp.

“I fix that, mom.”

“Fuck you.” She got down to his size and bore her eyes into his head. “There’s nothing wrong with that lamp.”

One night, Alois brought home something special from Tractor Supply. A box full of chirping, and full of movement. A dozen little yellow baby chickens. The kids cooed and applauded them in joy. 4 died under the heat lamp that day. 3 more died of infection spreading from their lungs into their heads. 2 more got carried off my cats, and one more got eaten by a rat. Only two remained.

One night Trace followed the purple aura from his closet, down the low tunnel. He crawled on his hands and knees beckoned by a bright singing voice and the impact of a power drill. He pushed down the tunnel until it ended, and he saw the purple aura glowing along the cracks of a trapdoor overhead. He pressed it open and found himself in the garage. He stood over the two surviving chicks sleeping in their box of straw.

He grabbed one like he always did, he petted it and kept trying to grab its wing. It didn’t like that. He only tore out some feathers, so the chick pecked him so hard that it drew blood.

Trace grabbed it by the neck and flung it around until it stopped making noise and hung there in his fingers. Then he tore off its wings, tore out it's feet, and tore the beak. Then he reached inside of its wounds to tear out some organs. Then he moved to the next bird and did the exact same thing.  

Art: CrOPPED, Xelanoj Art, 2022.