On his way to Die.

She’d hardly glanced at him in the passing, but her hair had caught in the wind and tousled over her shoulders. It smelled like magnolia and her eyes had stung his heart with the haunting echo of deja-vu.

He thought about his parents. They’d advocated things like time and how love works in linear equations, no sex before marriage sort of values. It’s a sacred thing and marriage is forever. They’d divorced after 17 years and his father’d blown his brains out in the summer of ’97. He turned back, thought maybe he’d just caught the last sight of her taking a left on Washington, but the sun was high and bright and he’d never exactly seen the back of her head so he couldn’t quite be sure. It didn’t matter anyway. She was her and he was him and she was there and he was here and she’d disappeared into the blink of a million towering windows all gaping down upon the city with eyes that never closed. He hadn’t even known her name.

He was sure he didn’t need to take his shoes off, but he did anyway. Tucked them neatly side by side in the gap separating concrete from steel. He didn’t want anyone to trip on them.  

The wilderness of men roared behind him. The smell of hot rubber, the squeal of tapped brakes, the clang of steel upon steel; somewhere a siren howled. He did not see the man flash by, ashing his cigarette out a partly cracked window and wondering if his wife was going to smell the booze on his breath, or the woman behind him who was eating as she drove and had seen James standing there in only socks, supposed he was some vagrant hobo before forgetting about him altogether in the space of time it took to smack her lips.

He paused at the sight of his socks. The left was red and the right was black. He hadn’t even noticed.

He gripped the rail, thought again of the girl, half wondered if there might be an article in the paper tomorrow about some man who’d flung himself off the bridge and she’d remember having passed him, maybe she’d feel sad, think that he’d been handsome and in some silly wisp of girlish daydream picture them kissing. The steel was cold and somehow mocking, perfectly appropriate for the moment.

He heard a horn bleat above him as he fell. The sky seemed unnaturally blue, soft and striking, impervious to the sprawling stain of mankind that had raped the face of the earth beneath it. Beneath the ribs of the bridge he could see great grey lumps of feathers peppering every available space. He remembered his father once calling them rats with wings, but he thought the colony nestled there underneath the overpass somehow beautiful and suddenly the thought occurred to him that all of life could be beautiful in the exact same way if he only approached it from a different perspective.

He didn’t feel most his bones breaking as his body was introduced to Great Mud. He never knew that he was swept downstream a half mile before being caught by the fin of the outboard motor blade on a moored Newport, 27 footer. All the boats were supposed to be buoyed in the marina with motors up, but the owner had simply forgotten and it was the only thing that had stopped him from being swept out to sea and being forever classified as some unsolved mystery. His body would be discovered a week later, but he’d never know that either. The last thought to pass through his mind was the wonder over what her skin would have felt like against his own had they met during better times.

                                                                 *****

She made a habit of coming out here at least once a week. She liked the scents of mud and salt mingling together like awkward teenagers and how at sunset the bridge in the distance was silhouetted over the river like a black rainbow in some upside down universe. It somehow made her think of innocence and dreams and the beginning of great adventures. She liked the way the dock swayed slightly beneath the weight of her body and made her legs slightly question each step. She thought the rows and rows of sailboats and yachts surrounding her seemed like a great flock of giant, sleeping ducks.

She paused at the nose of a sailboat. It was a Newport, 27 footer. She knew it because her father had owned one just like it and she’d spent many Chesapeake afternoons daydreaming abaft. The vessel was sleek, white with a single, purple stripe running horizontally down the side. The window crowning the galley reminded her of an oblong, beady eye. It scrutinized her carefully. On its hull: Daisy.

She moved towards the stern, the river slapping the boat like some lazy dog lapping water. Something bobbed near the lowered motor. She stooped, she’d heard stories of poor manatees getting injured in motor blades left down like this, submerged her hand and free’d the object.

She stood, gasped. Her insides twisted. His skin was grey, sallow and taut where it was not. Swollen. Bloated. There seemed something familiar about him. It made her mind stutter for a name or a time or a place from which she might have known him but she could place nothing.

She turned her head to vomit. The wind tousled her hair over her shoulder, it smelled slightly of magnolia.