Story: The Ad Said (conclusion)

The Ad Said

(part three)

Along the rails was a place to walk, a narrow trench, not clearly intended…or clearly not intended…for public use. A wrong step could lose you your shoe. More rotten luck if it happened.

“I can go first,” Hermie said. “Look out where you put your foot.”

“God. The river.”

Hettie wasn’t moving; she was leaning on a beam. Hermie stopped, took her own tight hold, and looked down. You didn’t see the water from this angle, the current in the twilight, the way it wrinkled and frothed at the pylons, the dark middle sliding under the bridge…

And the cold, sorrowing smell.

Then there was a fish.

Or a thing pontoon-shaped, glowing from its belly, faint and phosphorescent. Big for a fish. Moving start-stop like a buoyant sack.

It snagged, and rolled.

“It’s a man, isn’t it?”

It was shaped like one—it had arms and legs. It had a head with earholes and no ears, a flabby gash dividing the hair, that matter-of-factly exposed the skull and did not bleed.

It passed, and they peered down through the ties, not having got enough of it.

They heard the whistle. Neither spoke. Both looked wildly right and left. They were at the center, with no better answer. Hermie took off for the Regisville side.

She did call out, “Hettie, come on!”

She thought also, hurtling herself in leaps, landing teetering, gathering into the next, that a train would slow down, it ought to, going where there were houses. But which end was it coming from? She couldn’t make out.

Her final landing knocked off a shoe…but by the strap, it held. The whistle so close at her back heaved Hermie’s shoulders and raced her heart, but she was down the embankment, tripping, tumbling to a sit. She put a finger inside her heel and dragged the shoe back on.

This task was enough to think about. Maybe stupid accidents always happened like that.

You got your routine out of kilter, and you didn’t have time, when it…the train…

Or what about that man in the paper, the gas explosion, just switching on a light in his kitchen?

He wasn’t expected home. His wife had put her head in the oven.

Their mother, the three of them drinking tea around the table: “You girls! Stop that! Giggling, what’s funny?”

Or the woman who fell, it must have been last summer, sitting back against a window screen at her own party?

You didn’t have time, Hermie told herself, to think of what you should do.

The train thundered onwards, and when the red lights of the last car were tiny, the whistling gone prolonged and slow, the creak of metal now ticking muted and sedate, she stood. She looked, through the dark, at the bridge…and it was only a silhouette over the river.

3

he Ad Said

The Ad Said (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)