Below

Before

Nellie's long brown hair bounced behind her as she ran ahead of me towards the bridge. This had become our tradition. Nearly every day after school the two of us would drive to a forgotten dirt parking lot just off the highway outside of town, tuck the car in just far enough so that it wouldn't be seen from the road, and we'd walk the 5 minutes to the bridge.            

The bridge was a huge part of the town back when my parents were kids. It was the main bridge people used to cross Willow Creek. But ever since they added the newer bridge in town, this one had been completely forgotten. There were signs at the beginning of the road warning that it was a minimal maintenance road, and the evidence showed that—weedy grass spiraled out of the ground in the middle of the gravel, the road itself looked almost too dangerous to walk on. And the closer you got to the bridge, the more "Bridge Closed" signs popped up. It was wooden, and probably couldn't handle the weight of a truck and trailer, but it was a nice hang out spot. And we hung out here all the time. It's like everyone forgot it existed. No houses were in this part of the woods so no one had any reason to come here. No one, except us.

Nellie had been the one to find it and show it to me, like most things. She had a different way of viewing the world that was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. She could make the most bland things seem fun. And I loved that about her. Like I loved most things about her.

The wooden bridge came into view as Nellie jumped up on the handrail with her arms straight out at her sides to keep balance.

A thrum of fear ran through me.

"Be careful!" She was always being reckless, always pushing the limit; anything to get a rise out of me.

She whipped her head around to look at me, a smile stretched across her face. "Okay, mom," she joked.

Then she jumped down and swung a leg over the handrail, and then the other, hanging on by mere finger tips behind her. She looked down at the water and then at me. I sat down next to her, letting my feet dangle off the edge. The water far below us looked dark and dangerous.

"We could do it, you know."

"Do what?"

"Jump. Just lean forward a little more and that would be it. We'd be nothing. Erased. Just another fallen tree in the current of life."

"That's not something to joke about, Nellie."

She turned to me then, her eyes uncharacteristically cold. "I wasn't joking."