“The Bridge,” Fiction, Renesha Dhanraj.

When I used to walk Mahaicony Bridge in the daytime, I was bound to run into people I didn’t like. Not anyone in particular—just people, that collection of people I was likely to find coming and going in a ceaseless procession right up to the end of the workday, at which point the mob slinks home only to return the next day. Of all these people, the worst were the mothers, who pushed prams and looked at me so searingly that I was sure they were criticizing my short pants and loose hair and cursing me as whoreish. If they weren’t criticizing me, then their eyes roved my body—from my large and unwomanly feet, to my chubby belly and too-round face. Eyes that penetrated clothing and flesh. What narcissism deters you from having children and suffering like we do?

These women reminded me of my own mother, and the sight of them invariably returned to me the memory of a childhood incident I’ve tried in vain to forget. For some reason I can’t remember—maybe because they didn’t trust me at home or because my pleading annoyed them too much—my parents allowed me to accompany them on a visit to one of mother’s friends. This was an allowance they had never granted me before. Children, they would say—girl children, particularly, have no place in adult business.

My mother, forever eager for other people’s approval, was more anxious than usual to make a good impression. She had not seen her friend’s family in a long time. It was her school friend, or a colleague from when she worked as a typist in Georgetown. As for me—I was nine years old—I looked forward to playing “big woman” and eating pine tarts past my bedtime. In the days leading up to the visit, my mother would stop in the middle of wiping the walls or reducing curry on the stovetop, to assure my father and me that her friend always baked fresh pine tarts for guests. Her friend, after all, was a decent woman. My father—well, my father lived for a good time and never had a care in the world. Men can afford not to.

We reached the house with no trouble and were seated on a plush settee. I can’t remember how the evening passed, but everything leading up to our departure must have been unremarkable because it was the departure that has imprinted itself onto my mind after all these years. My father went outside first so he could smoke before our walk home. In those days, people walked everywhere, regardless of the distance and the sun turning their brown necks black. Only nowadays will a car fly past the village, carrying a woman daubing her neck with a cloth soaked in ice water and a man’s arm squeezing her shoulders until they blistered. Mother had a rule that he couldn’t smoke in my presence because she was afraid of what that would do to a child already possessing a fragile constitution. I know she was really afraid of what her friend would think when they saw my father nonchalantly blowing smoke rings, which he often did when stuffed from a good dinner, into my curious face.

She and I were just about to cross the threshold of the door when her friend—our hostess—asked me a question. Or made a joke. Some remark about my family. I laughed. I babbled something in agreement. Then I felt a pain in my right foot. My mother, who stood on my right, was grinding her left foot onto my toes. She wore her marigold heels—a color forbidden to me until I married and became a complete woman—and I had on a flimsy sandal. With every twist of the heel into my naked feet, peeling back layers and layers of skin, I expected a stream of red to gush out. An upside-down waterfall. Then I became conscious of wetness dripping from my toes, sticking them together. I was bleeding. The beginnings of a scream passed my lips—more from the thought of myself bleeding than from the pain itself—but a look from my mother silenced me. A look that said a worse punishment than toe grinding was in store back home if I didn’t see my conversation with the oblivious woman to a close. I must have looked like those fair clowns who grin while their head is hammered. Maybe I had broached one of the many taboo topics my mother had often warned me no respectable girl would talk about to strangers, topics mother admonished me never to even think about because thinking can corrupt. Or maybe I’d smiled too much at the men. Maybe I didn’t hunch enough. Anything and everything had upset my mother. So upset that I feared her for the rest of my life; and although whenever I got licks, my father would be the one who took off his belt, it was the sight of my mother’s shadow in the adjoining room that had me screaming. When I met those aproned women on the bridge, my toes instinctively curled upon themselves.

Now I only walked the bridge at night, when I wanted to believe there is nothing to fear. I taught a class that ends promptly at ten and, as a precaution so I didn’t have to endure the chatter of children and teachers, I hung around the classroom for half an hour before stepping out into the chilled world. The nocturnal birds were not out yet, so the road was quiet when I left the schoolhouse one night and began my journey over the bridge. There exists a time of day between the start of the sun’s descent and the curtain of night when objects and people assume a pleasing hue. If you were to run into your worst enemy under this spell, you would not think him a very ugly fellow. I found myself caught in this space. The world, I thought, seemed bearable. I slackened my pace and sagged my shoulders, allowing my arms to swing freely as I walked. This was a welcome change from plastering them to my sides—a habit leftover from my mother’s conditioning. The proper way for a woman to walk.

Somewhere within the trees, a crappo took up croaking and was answered by another nearby. What do crappos croak about in the stillness of night when nothing flutters, not an animal chirps with news of an onslaught of fruit falling onto the forest floor and the river isn’t troubled from boys splashing about? Do they wonder about the stranger whose footsteps are at that moment interrupting their croaking and tramping upon fresh leaves? I knew that I was a body walking on a bridge, but I fancied myself invincible, a will-o-wisp alighting from branch to branch, with not a thought to fetter me to the ground and keep me slave to the usual anxieties running through my head when my mind isn’t occupied with a task for which there is a definitive answer. Lampposts studded the bridge behind and before me—I walked under one and the illusion broke. There was a shadow of the schoolhouse on the badly paved stones. Perception and feeling aligned. I was just a body walking a bridge.

Since I was the last to leave the schoolhouse that night, I knew there couldn’t be anyone still inside the building. The happenings of the day, however, were still keen in my memory so now that I’d become conscious of the building, I couldn’t help but hear the chatter of students and teachers echo from behind me. The impression was so strong I feared I would see figures fraternizing in the window if I turned around.

The bells are always the worst part of the school day. After three years of teaching, I haven’t shaken off the schoolchild mindset. When they ring, they still ring for me, foretelling the lashing in store if I’m not seated with my hands folded on the benchtop, my lunch bag containing my egg ball and sour, tucked snugly against my thigh, before the teacher calls roll. There were many days when the morning bell rang and I sat abruptly at my desk, frozen until one of my students gently reminded me that it was time for me to begin the lesson.

I worked alongside a mean teacher named Mr. Singh. He wasn’t any meaner than the other teachers at the school, but he made no attempt to hide whatever cruelty he thought was his privilege and right. He laughed when our students became frustrated at a maths question and howled when they cried. He tormented the girls the worst. No vestiges of a former childhood lingered anywhere in his features. He had been a balding, domineering man inside the womb, I was sure. He preferred the switch over words; and every time the wood fell upon a student’s hands, my own palms smarted. The phantom pain I felt watching my students beaten was so strong I began slathering my hands with Vaseline on the days Mr. Singh taught with me. The Vaseline was a trick from my own schooldays, when teachers used thinner sticks, fashioned to leave streaks of permanent welts on the skin. My classmates and I had to be careful; apply too little and our hands would be branded for eternity, too much and the teachers would notice, turning what may have been ten lashes into twenty.

One day, Mr. Singh noticed my Vaselined hands. He unbuttoned my cuffs, rolled up the sleeves of my shirt to my elbows and enfolded both of my hands within his left hand. With his right, drew out the switch that he kept coiled in his trouser pocket—a snake that seemed to have no end. I would be his demonstration, he said, of what would happen to students caught with cream or oil in their possession. He began his attack. I didn’t want my students to see me cry, so I shut my eyes as tightly as I could but that didn’t prevent the drops from streaming down the corner of my eyelids after coagulating there. I couldn’t see what my students were doing. They were silent. At first. Then I heard a clap, then another and another and another, until I heard chairs scraping the wood floor and shuffling. They had formed a circle around Mr. Singh and me, and above the crack of the switch, I heard deep, masculine laughter.

Afterward, our students filed out to play-wrestle and bully one another in the schoolyard. Mr. Singh sat me down on a chair and he stayed standing. Mesmerized by the red oozing out of my palms and forearms, he dabbed at my skin with a handkerchief. When he asked me, It hurt? I lied and said, No. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. His bushy eyebrows predictably lifted in disappointment. But he kept rubbing, rubbing so hard that he was splitting flesh and squeezing more red out of me, rubbing as if to paint my entire body red. I prayed for lunch to end.

The crack of a switch—or its afterimage—I heard on the bridge that night, unsettled me. The crappos had long stopped croaking. The birds never made an appearance. Perhaps they had lost their way within the overgrown trees. Or held up by one of their members with a sprained wing. Maybe they had been cornered by a predator and devoured. I squinted into the blackness on all sides of me, searching for movement. Nothing. They were not coming. No sweet melody for me. It sometimes happens that one can force into existence make-believe, that the act of imagining movement and action will bring those two things about where before there was only stillness. There was nothing on the bridge but the wind.

Do you know what the worst part is? the wind asked.

Old Reno had a daughter.

They found her chopped up in the creek.

The murderer got away and

the mother cried all week.

Two men were walking toward me, giggling. I thought they were jumbee at first. But the stench emanating from them, even from so far off, told me just how human they were. They were butchers. Only butchermen can recite a rhyme like that and laugh in the same breath. I was curious. They were so far off. I crept toward the metallic smell to hear what they were gaffing about. At that distance they were only shadowy, staggering forms. Harmless. One stocky, one skinny. The stocky one continued his tale while the curtain of night grew thicker around us, sucking up some of his words so I only heard patches of the conversation and had to fill in the rest with imagination.

Reno was born three days after a full moon, so he could never stay mad at anyone for long. People like him like to hum—garbled notes, nothing particular—and when he left work that evening, he was breaking into a hum every twenty paces. He hauled fish from the boats and hacked them into neat, bloody cubes so they could fit into transport containers. He stunk of fish and had cuts all over him that would burst open and ooze pus and blood, because the wounds never got a chance to heal—you know how hard that work is. Your father was a fisherman. He never talked about his work? Well, take my word for it.

Despite all that, he was humming. He could trick himself into loving his work as we do. When he was low, he reminded himself how he could take the useless cuts home to make into saltfish or fry fish. He could work outside all day—he loved being outside—and when his baby girl died, he started seeing her hazel eyes in every glassy-eyed cod with its mouth splayed open by the hook, staring back at him, and hearing her cries in the gulls scavenging for food. It was like she had never gone.

He was walking home from work one evening. Did I say that already? He walked through the market on the wharf. The sun was low, so the stalls were closing, but the smell of roast duck and fresh salara was still in the air. You know how the food smell lingers. Them and the salt air together, create the best smell ever—enough to make you hungry all over again after you stuff yourself with whatever garbage is at home. Reno’s mouth started dribbling, and as he walked, he let his eyelids linger a long time shut before reopening them. He was imagining his wife greeting him with a steaming plate of pepper pot and bread. The day before, he killed their fattest chicken for the stew. The fowl was his favorite, but the time was approaching when he had to act or risk spoiling the meat. His wife was a good cook. She would cook up the chicken real nice, plenty of casareep and cinnamon. The bread, too, was right—a proper four-days stale. Their first real meal in a long time. People saw him strolling with his stupid eyes closed. He was a happy man.

I eased up. This was not a story, my mother would say, that decent girls should listen to. But the men continued to advance toward me, the husky voice of the stocky one growing louder and louder, reaching a feverish pitch while all was quiet and not even the crappos called. I was still so far from home; I felt as if I might never reach back.

When the girl was alive, he had a habit of peeping through the front window before going in the cottage. He’d see Mag and the girl setting the table, heaping his plate up so when he got home, all he had to do was sit and eat. Mag would set a basin of water near him so he could wash his hands, get the guts off him. For old times’ sake, he peeped. Mag was at the stove, finishing up a dish. Her back was to him, and he stood there looking at how her cotton dress hugged the nape of her neck.

Only the climax remained and before he spoke, I shuddered. I knew what he would say, even before the words took shape in his crass, butcherman brain. I could no longer walk. I wished for nothing else but that I could walk, could run out of hearing distance and not stop until I was home and the door bolted behind me. But I couldn’t walk.

When he went in, she turned from the stove and hugged him. He dropped his bag and embraced her. Inside of him, those dusty, neglected emotions kicked up, the ones Mag had lost all interest in since their daughter died. Enough time was now past. His groin fluttered, and heat seeped up his body. They had not touched since they lost her. There was a bee; a bee had flown in. Mag hated bees. He would skewer it with the pinta broom, and then he would fuck her. The pepper pot, with the bread, sliced, on small plates around the big basin, was getting cold. Mag had set three places. He’d have to do a better job of reminding her—but what did it matter now that they were making a new baby? When he looked down to plant a wet kiss on his woman’s head, he saw the silver of the cutlass. Run through. The blade was almost entirely buried in his flesh. The pain was no more than a bee’s sting. The pepper pot, with the bread, sliced, on small plates around the big basin, was getting cold.

They passed directly under a streetlamp—one of the rusted ones that can barely produce a dim halo and only with much effort—and I saw the white aprons streaked with blood. Their faces were still in shadows, everything about them was except for those red aprons. They carried them tied to their necks; the frayed cloth hung down their backs and flapped as they walked. The configuration of man and apron stirred something inside me. They looked too much like the animals they slaughtered—before those animals arrive at the butcher shop, when they’re still yoked in an open pasture and fear the whip of the farmer who enslaves them. What bothered me was the carelessness with which these men were able to take that extension of themselves, the token of their worth upon this earth, and nonchalantly throw it over their shoulder, the way a philanderer flings a rose at a blushing girl.

When the men’s laughter—they had laughed throughout the tale—had so overtaken them that they had to stop to catch their breath, I thought I would vomit. They were close now. And they were drunk; the way in which they laughed convinced me of it. Instead of that smooth shoulder-rolling that typically accompanies laughter, their bodies undulated in apoplectic jerks like that of an angry sea. I pictured them waving adieu to their boss, who was no doubt a pot-bellied little man in the habit of staying late to count legs and rumps and sharpen cutlasses for the following day. On any other day, the men would have gone straight home, but today was a Friday and they wanted to celebrate the upcoming weekend. The only place open so late would be Leeta’s, where customers let off steam by stomping on the necks of terrified mice. They were only a few paces from me. When they finished their laughing and wheezing, they would fall upon me. I felt the tennis roll I’d eaten for breakfast roll around in my belly, a ball of sludge. I had on a sundress, the only barrier between my flesh and theirs.

With the hope of disappearing, I lowered my body to ground, staining up my knees and white dress. I didn’t stop until I was lying prone and swallowing dirt, which stuck to the roof of my mouth and made screaming impossible. It rained the night before, so when I fell, instead of the muffled thud my body would have produced on dry mud, an ugly squashing sound surprised myself and the men. They turned. When they saw a woman lying in the mud, the chivalry lying dormant within them—remnants of tribesmen, kings, and conquerors—rekindled. They don’t have much opportunity in the butcher shop to exercise the urge to save a woman. A woman might order a leg of lamb or a pound of chicken feet, and the butchers might take their time wrapping the meat in the brown parcel stamped with the shop’s logo—a plump chicken upon a chopping block with its feet in the air—after which they’ll truss the parcel, as delicately as stubby fingers can transfigure twine into bow. Any respectable woman, however, will always be with a husband, so parcel-wrapping and bow-tying are as far as their efforts can go. They can’t even tip their white caps at her, because when a husband is present, all other males pale in comparison; all comfort and dazzling lie within the husband’s hands. When butchermen see a person—alone—in the mud, they must run and if there is a fluttering of a scarf or dress hem, they must run faster. Fast but not ungainly. At the last fifty feet or so, they must slacken their pace and swing their hands loosely by their sides—as if they would rather be anywhere than there, but because fate placed them there, they would be generous with their goodwill. Goodwill can only get you so far. The men pulled me up and tried to balance my body between theirs; one clasped me around my waist and the other held onto my shoulder and when that didn’t work, they switched positions. My legs were entrenched in the mud and, pull as hard as they could, I would not budge. I am on that bridge still.

Renesha Dhanraj is a graduate of the MFA Fiction Program at Brooklyn College. Her work has been performed in the Liars’ League reading series in London, longlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, nominated for a Pushcart, and is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review. She is currently working on a short story collection that explores rural Guyanese life. She spends her time between Brooklyn and The Bronx. When she’s not writing, she teaches English at Brooklyn College and works as a nurse.