Bridge's House

"Aunt Bridge?" she called through the screen. The door itself was wide open, even though the air was chilly with fall. Shelly shielded her eyes with her hand, peering in through the dusty screen. "Hello? Aunt Bridge? Are you in there?"

Shelly glanced over her shoulder down the street, looking for someone, anyone, she might be able to call out to in case of an emergency - maybe someone broke in. Maybe the worst had happened and Aunt Bridge had some sort of medical emergency... as if that made any sense. Why would a medical emergency lead to the door standing open at 5pm in September. What Shelly was really looking for, down that tiny street, was a sense of regularity. Something to re-establish reality.

Lark street was lined with almost-identical houses, as though they had all been built from the same Make-a-house Kit. They were each painted a different color, but they were all very neat and trim. Lawns were mowed. A couple of houses had flags over their doors, one had a carefully tended rosebush prominently displayed. One even had a small statue of a child squatting next to a smaller statue of a frog. But the houses were alike inbuild and in the care taken of them. The driveways had different cars, if they had cars at all, but were all free of debris. The cars sitting in the debris-free driveways most likely worked. Insdie, the houses would be more or less neat and clean. The air would be breathable. The rooms themselves functional.

And then there was this house. Aunt Bridge's House.

It was the corner house, which made it stand out even more, if that was possible, given the bright shade of Barbie pink it had been painted. Even though the paint was peeling and chipped, it had lost none of it's color. The house itself was falling apart. Two shutters hung on loose hinges, and a window on the side of the house was actually barded up with boards, the boards themselves plywood stolen from a construction site across town, and half covered in spray paint.

The yard, however, was in such a state that the house was hardly noticable. It was clutteres with birdbaths, half begun gardening projects that involved deep holes and shovels still stuck in the earth. Piles of rocks , tin cans hainging from sticks and strings, and various other "Art" were scattered all over the place. This was exactly what Shelly had loved about Aunt Bridge's house when she was a little girl. And now that she was an adult she could see the danger in it, the disorganization, the senility, the mess, the craziness. It looked as though the bracken in back of the houses had actually vomited the unsavory parts of the woods and wilderness onto Aunt Bridge's property, and no one had cleaned it up yet.

Shelly pushed open the screen door and walked inside. It was, as usual, a cluttered mess. Shelly held her reath, trying to postpone the unavoidable scent of pent up air and dust and cooking and inscence and mold she would inhale as soon as the needed to take her first breath. "Aunt Bridge?" she called again. "Are you home?"

The light switch did nothing. Shelly gritted her teeth, wondering how long Aunt Bridge's light had been out and how long she would go without replacing it. The old woman might live years in a house with no working lightbulbs, and then be surprised and offended when someone mentioned the fact that she didn't have to live in the dark.

Maybe this is it, she thought. Maybe this is when I walk into a room and find Aunt Bridge... what> Had died in her sleep? Had suffered a heart attack? Hung herself in the closet? Had suffocated under a pile of fallen... junk?

Shelly stepped around a pile of books in the bathroom and peeked into the shower. Nothing. She walked carefully down the hall into the bedroom, dodging a trunk filled with rocks and sticks and a storage container of... scarves? Were those brightly colored scarves? Shelly peeked her head into the bedroom.

Aunt Bridge lay on the bed, eyes closed. A book spread open on her chest, her reading glasses askew on her face. Half of her grey-blond hair escaped the simple braid she wore each day, and frizzed around her face. The face was... slack. Shelly strained to see a sign, any sign, that her Aunt was still breathing.

"Aunt Bridge?" she whispered. "Bridget? Are you seeping?" Shelly took a step closer to the bed and reached out to take a pulse... if she remembered her first aid it would be right there, on the neck...

Her Aunt jerked back in surprise and Shelly shrieked in startled irritation.

"Oh, Shelly! How long have I been asleep?" the older woman asked, straining to sit up.

"Jesus! Aunt Bridge! You left the door wide open! I thought something happened to you!"

Aunt Bridge fixed her glasses and closed her book, folding the page back to mark it. "Well that makes no sense," she said. "Why would the door being open mean anything had happened to me?"

Shelly shook her head and turned back towards the kitchen. "Where do you keep your light bulbs?" she shouted.

The Bracelet

"You dropped something," he had said, reaching his hand into her pocket. She felt that same weakness spread through her body stemming from where his hand had brushed her hip through her coat pocket. What had she dropped? She softly picked her way through the kitchen to the chair she had thrown her coat over when she had gotten home, and slowly reached into the pocket, not wanting the rustling of the material to wake Jerry, asleep on the couch.
It was a bracelet.
And it wasn't hers.
It probably belonged to one of the other girls, but none of them had said anything about missing a bracelet.
She shook it, rubbing dirt off the charms as gently as she could. It was a thin chain, for a charm bracelet, and the charms seemed tiny themselves, delicate. There were five of them: a baby shoe with "1997" inscribed on the sole, a heart with a clear stone, a butterfly with both clear and blue stones in it's tiny wings, a couple of music notes with clear gemstones in the note parts, and something that looked like a book. "To JC from CW" was inscribed on the tiny cover, like the title of the tiny little novel. That was the biggest charm everything else was very tiny.
It didn't seem like something that would belong to Tasha or Ginger.
For a second she thought it might be a gift to her from Jesse, but them she remembered the initials on the book. She was not JC and he was definitely not CW. Whoever those people were.
This belonged to someone else.
She took it to the bathroom and dipped it in a cup of water. SHe was afraid she might rust it, but she was trying to get more of the dirt off. Whoever had lost it had lost it a while ago she guessed. They might not be looking for it. At least not anymore. It was surprising, actually, that something so tarnished and caked with dirt would be so... complete. The inscriptions were legible. The stones were still there - none had fallen out. They were tiny, tiny little stones - more fragments, than actual stones. But still. You could tell what they were
She looped it around her wrist and fastened it. The clasp worked with no problem. She was actually able to fasten it the first try, which was more than she could say for anything else with those little clasps.
The bracelet was warm from the water, and made her wrist seem graceful. She glanced into the bathroom mirror, half expecting to see a willowy, perfect-hair person staring back. But it was still her, hair frizzed out, eyes startled and a little bit poofy from crying and lack of sleep.
"I am not going to be with Jesse," she whispered to herself. She knew it was true, and she was, surpisingly, OK with it. The bracelet was light and tickly on the back of her hand and she brushed her hair back from her face and smiled.

Woods - first part

Someone had hung red CD's from the trees. They had looped string through the CD's and then just flung the ends up into the tangled mess of branches. The CD's must have been either the same CD or someone had spray painted them bright red. Either way, the effect was oddly festive, especially from the road.

In the dark, she couldn't see the CD's. Everything was blue and black, the only light coming from the distant windows of Tom's mother's house and the tips of lit cigarettes traveling to and from teenage lips. She could make out the warm mist of her own breath in the late October air, and she hugged her chest tighter, remembering how she and her sister used to pretend they were smoking when they breathed out into the cold. Now that she was standing with a group of smokers, her breath didn't resemble the smoke at all.

Jesse offered her a cigarette and she took it, anxious to look calm and confident, as though she smoked and stood out in the dark and the cold for no reason on a daily - um - nightly basis. She hated cigarette smoke. She hated the dark and the cold. But Jesse, she liked.

Some of the guys and a couple of the girls were sipping beer from a smuggled six pack. When Tom extended one to Jesse he shook his head and put his arm around her shoulders. She could feel the warmth of him through her jacket. She could smell his soap, even though the smoke.

The talk was mostly about guys they knew, about people they knew who could drive, and about how to get pot. She didn't have much to contribute, so she did her best to laugh at all the right places and look like she was smoking the cigarette in her fingers. After awhile, Jesse leaned over and plucked it from her, taking a deep drag and lighting the tip bright red. "Smoking's a nasty habit," he whispered in her ear. "If you don't smoke already, you probably shouldn't start." He pulled her closer as he finished off her smoke.

Her mother thought she was at Heather's. She wasn't worried about her mother calling, and she knew Heather would cover for her because she had covered for Heather on more than a few afternoons while she met with her own boyfriend, Jackson, in his car. Jackson seemed really old for Heather, but whatever. Heather had her own life. And now she was returning the favor. Which made it all worth it.

Driving

The road looked different.
She hadn't actually expected to make it out of the driveway, but the minivan easily turned with the road instead of sliding into the trees, as she had expected. She didn't know what she would have done if that had happened. She couldn't even think about the consequenses of that one. She wouldn't have been hurt, no. It was a driveway. But if the car had been damaged, if she had been unable to get out, and if she had had to explain how her car came to be here, in this particular driveway, at this particular time of day... well, she wouldn't have been able to do it. So when she pulled out into the road, she was distracted. She could feel her fingers tingling and her heart thumping and thoughts flooding her brain. "I almost lost everything," she thought. And of course she was right. It was too risky. It would have to stop. She couldn't come here anymore. It would just be that simple. Jared would understand when she didn't call him. She would start shopping at the Shaws instead of the FoodMart. He might never run into her by accident.
She wasn't sure, at first, if the road looked different because of her new outlook on life or because of the snow. Everything always looked different in the snow, but she had seen snow before. She had seen this road in snow before. It wasn't until a tree branch hit her winshield that she realized it was the ice.
It was a pine tree, one with the long, soft needles. She expected a soft brushing noise, but instead the branch hit with a sharp THUD and the winshield cracked. "My God!" she cried out. She slowed even more, glancing at the clock. She was going to be late picking up her kids. "Well, I probably won't be the only one," she thought. The road wasn't too bad, but broken branches lay in the road.
She kept having to avoid them - they were big branches. Around each one was what looked like broken glass. At first she thought some other poor driver had had their winsheild really smashed, then she saw it was ice. Ice. Ice coated each branch, each pine needle, each remaining leaf. That's why the branches were so low - the weight of it all. That's why her car winsheild had broken. The weight of the branch...
It did look beautiful though.
Leave it to nature to make the beautiful so deadly. Wind, water, ice, snow... all so pretty. All so seemingly innocent. But you wouldn't want to be stuck in it. She glanced over and was able to see that each blade of grass in a yard was covered with it's own ice armor. In the bushes, each leaf was coated in ice. She would be able to take off the ice, and have perfect ice leaves in the palm of her hand.
That's what she was noticing when her car tire hit the branch in the road. She braked, but the car kept going, swerving diagonally. She heard the soft whump of the tires hitting the snow on the side of the road, and closed her eyes as the minivan fell down an incline, into a pile of rocks.
Less than two minutes later another car passed. The couple in the car noticed the branch and avoided it. They also noticed the freshly broken trees, but didn't see a car or any lingering evidence of a crash. They assumed, without thinking of it, that the accident had been a small one, and that no people had been seriously harmed.
That night the temperature dropped below zero and stayed there for three days. Before the cold snap was over, posters covered the town and those surrounding asking for information on her wherabouts.