Design
Bridge didn't have a lot of friends, but he was the only one in Seattle who knew about the faeries.
He was thin-ish and lanky, with soft brown hair and dark eyes that were not happy or inviting. After school he liked to wander around through dusty alleys and past seedy grey drugstores and roach motels, or read the graffiti tattooing the phone booths and doorways around his apartment. Clubs didn't interest him, sports even less so. He didn't know what he wanted to be when he grew up but he had a vague desire to be the homeless guy that sat on the bench near the bus stop and strummed a guitar. He wanted to be part of the city—the seedy part, the dusty part, the part that painted its messages on the walls for everyone to see.
All the poets they read about in school wrote about nature—waterfalls and gardens and moonlight. And that's where they seemed to think all the faeries would be. But Bridge could see the magic in the flickering sodium streetlights at night, in the moon hanging like the back of a silver teaspoon over the misty tops of skyscrapers in early morning. He understood why the faeries would cluster about the streetlights and dance through the dust of urban decay.
Bridge was the only one that could see them. And he spent long hours wandering in dark corners and dim back alleys to catch glimpses of them because he was too enthralled by the city's strange beauty to be afraid of its definite danger.
The faeries he'd seen before had never initiated conversation. They didn't seem to share any qualities with humans at all, actually—except their shape. On foggy days, they sometimes let their silhouettes be traced in the light of Bridge's flashlight, and he saw that they were grey and almost smoke-like, with a silver glow about them. They didn't have wings, but they also didn't seem to have any mass, so he could see how they flew. Like the dust particles when Bridge shook out the coats he never wore.
They were almost like ghosts. Except they fluttered, somehow. Maybe they had wings he didn't know about.
The day a faery finally spoke to him came close to being the last day of his life.
It was a cool, misty evening in November and Bridge had just seen a faery float into the alley between Sam's Tattoos and Fifth Street Pawn. After gently kicking aside a few empty boxes and one dilapidated shopping cart, he found it sitting on the edge of a rain gutter. In the sprinkling rain he could make out its silvery, human-shaped silhouette. He knelt on a pile of damp newspapers in front of it.
For a while he just stared, discovering details that were indiscernible from the distance he normally saw them. Like the tiny milk-colored eyes, scarcely larger than two pinpricks.
"Am I the only one that can see you?" he said finally. It was the question he'd decided to ask first, even if it wasn't the most important.
When the faery replied, Bridge found himself more surprised that it hadn't answered the question than that it was answering at all. "I've never seen you up close before," it said. "You look so strange."
"I could say the same to you," he said, trying not to sound offended.
"No," said the faery, "There's nothing particularly disturbing about my appearance. But this—" It fluttered up until it was hovering around Bridge's face, and pointed to his eyes . "These—folds, and deformations—"
Bridge squinted in confusion. "Eyelids, you mean?"
The faery's tone echoed the puzzlement Bridge felt. "Are theynormal for your kind?"
He tried not to smile. "Yes, actually."
"And these—" it fluttered down to his hands, and motioned toward one of his knuckles. "These little knobs—"
"Also normal."
The faery shook its head. "I won't say they're attractive."
"I guess they aren't, particularly," Bridge said thoughtfully, clenching and unclenching his hands and watching the knuckles. "But they're necessary."
He had gradually realized that faery hadn't been speaking at all, and he had been hearing this entire exchange in his head. But since it had happened so slowly, there'd never been a specific moment for him to stop and be shocked about it.
"You never answered my question," he said, fidgeting with one of the knuckles on his thumb.
"But that's not really the question you wanted to ask," it said demurely. "I think you should ask that one."
He sighed and let his hands fall into his lap. "Okay. Why can I see you?"
"That's not it either," said the faery, sounding a little annoyed. "But I'll answer it. It's because you're not afraid to be alone."
"Why would anyone be afraid to be alone?"
The faery brightened a little and Bridge felt a sense of his amusement. He wondered if that was how they laughed. "That's exactly what—"
Suddenly the faery's soft glow disappeared, and Bridge heard something shuffling through the cardboard and newspaper behind him. He jumped up in alarm, but too late.
His shoulders were roughly slammed into the dusty bricks, and he winced in pain. The assailant looked about thirty, with orange-ginger hair and pale blue eyes. He had already pulled a switchblade out and was holding it to Bridge's neck.
No reactions, Bridge heard the faery's voice say in his mind. What do I do? he screamed back.
"You're going to tell me you don't have any money," the man said. He pressed the blade a little closer, so he could feel the knife's edge. "But if you find some, you get to live."
Run, he thought instantly. He's going to kill me, I have to run.
No reactions, the faery repeated. Just words. No feelings.
He pressed his shaking hands against the wall behind him. "In my pocket."
Still holding the knife, the man dug through both of his pockets. The fruit of his efforts was a very decrepit one-dollar bill, two dimes, a receipt for Seven Eleven and three green skittles.
"If I killed you," he said, tossing them to the ground, "Would I find more in your socks or something?"
"No. That's all I have," he said, fighting to stay calm. For a brief moment he was absolutely sure he was going to die.
"Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn't kill you?" he said calmly. His pale blue eyes looked like they could have belonged to a loving father had things happened differently for him. For some reason this frightened Bridge even more.
Bridge found his behavior a little odd. Was this guy actually a mugger, or a serial killer? A mugger would have pushed him to the ground and run by now.
No reactions. No feelings. Just words."I…I don't have money. And…it make it e-easy for the cops to find you."
"Do you enjoy living?"
He closed his eyes, bracing himself. "Yes. A lot, actually. A whole lot."
Suddenly and confusingly, the gentle pressure of the blade moved from his neck. He cracked open an eye.
"Thanks," said the man, tucking the knife in his pocket and rubbing his palms on his ragged blue jeans. "I've been stuck on that scene formonths. I couldn't figure out how someone would react in a situation like that."
He blinked. "…what?"
"I'm a writer." He smiled, and his fatherly eyes twinkled. "One of my characters has just been mugged, and I couldn't figure out what he would do. I had to know what a victim is thinking in that situation."
Still very unnerved, Bridge couldn't help backing away to a safer distance. And he couldn't bring himself to meet those eyes, that had filled him with such terror moments before. "So you… mugged me. Just to see how I'd react."
"Basically."
He continued to stare at the man, trying to collect himself enough so that he could leave. But all he could do was wrap his hands around his neck where the knife had been, feeling his heartbeat, beat, beat, and feel so ecstatically grateful for it that he couldn't speak anymore.
Bridge actually was not completely without friends.
He had one friend. Sort of.
She had deep blonde hair—not ethereal white-blonde or perky yellow-blonde. It was almost nondescript, and didn't distract from her words or expressions. Her expressions were full and real and changed her face almost into someone else when she felt different things—all centered around her large grey-blue eyes that reflected her thoughts almost too candidly. Her words were like poetry that she was writing nonstop in her head—fragments and observations and thoughts.
Her name was Shaine and Bridge thought he might be in love with her.
She and he were alike in that both were, in a sense, alone. But Shaine could talk to other people—be friendly and tell stories and get them to talk back. Bridge couldn't.
She was actually having a vivid, if mostly one-sided, conversation with a football player when he shuffled over to his locker that morning. Her eyes were wide and bright and she was using her slender, long-fingered hands to illustrate something for him. He seemed interested but remained mostly unresponsive.
Bridge waited until they were finished before approaching her.
"Can I see your hands for a second?" She said immediately. Her eyes glittered.
He shrugged but hesitantly held them out to her. Her fingers were warm around his, which were perpetually cold. It was a balance that he had never appreciated until now. Her heat to his hands: he was warmer, she was colder. But she had warmth to spare.
"This," She ran her fingertips over his knuckles, gently bent and unbent his joints. "Under this is your skeleton. You can see it when you move your fingers. Like this."
He waited, patiently let her play with his hands.
"I was trying to explain it to Marcus. Why anatomy is important, and everything. And I can't find the words." She beamed, releasing his hands. "But isn't it just—well, your skeleton. And everything connected to it. It all works together. It's designed to work together, even though it doesn't seem to make sense."
He nodded.
"And no other design would work this way. And this design wouldn't work for other things. Like a petunia or a seahorse. Just for us."
"You told him that—?"
She smiled a little. "Not in those words."
"Not at all, you mean." He was silent for a second, trying to decide what he was thinking, exactly. Then he said, "I want to show you something."
Bridge had never thought he'd actually get around to taking Shaine to meet the faeries. But when asked if he enjoyed living, he'd suddenly, sharply realized that he did. He really did. In that sense, he was connected with all the happy people in the world, no matter how he felt. In that sense, he was connected with Shaine—and he needed that connection very, very badly, more even than the connection with the faeries.
Amazingly enough, he found the faery in the same place he had before—in fact, he found many faeries clustered around a nearby streetlamp, tinting its light silver. It was as though they were anticipating something.
Shaine's features were very still, but her eyes were so wide with excitement and joy that Bridge almost laughed.
The faery Bridge had spoken to floated up to hover near him. She knows your purpose better than you do.
He glanced at her and watched a tear skip down her cheek. Her reaction was amazing to him—but she always reacted differently than most people.
Only you can hear us. But only she can understand the way things are. You need each other.
He looked down. How do I ask?
The faery remained silent, only briefly glowing brighter with amusement. Taking this as an indication that he'd asked a stupid question, he turned to Shaine.
Hesitantly, he asked,
"What am I supposed to do?"
Abruptly he realized that this was the question he'd needed to know, that he'd been trying to ask the faery the first time. He could see the faeries. Maybe he was the only one, maybe it was because he was lonely, but that didn't matter—he needed to know his purpose.
"You know. You know, don't you?" She smiled and another tear fell down as she looked up at the streetlight. "It's in your name."
He tried to puzzle this out, but she continued,
"Bridge. You're a bridge, between them and us. You can't talk to people because you're meant to talk to them—and help them, help us."
He grinned—shyly, self-consciously—and looked up at the silver-tinted streetlight. Around it the city was dusty, graffitied, grey. The silvery spirit of vagabonds playing guitars, writers exploring the human heart, of football players practicing passes, of hands with skeletons beneath them working as they were designed.
A design Bridge was part of.
He took her hand and wrapped his own around them, waiting for the balance to be restored.