Bridge of Clay

Clay put his hands on his shoulders.

“She’ll meet you at the thylacine,” and it was that that nearly finished us—until all who was left was me.

For me, he was able to wait.

Soon he’d walked between us, the way boys often do. We don’t mind touching—shoulders, elbows, knuckles, arms—and now he’d turned and faced me.

For a while he said nothing at all; he simply made his way to the piano, and quietly lifted the lid. Inside remained her dress, and The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Slowly, he reached in, then handed the books to me.

“Go on,” he said, “open the top one.”

Inside were two separate notes.

The first was the letter from Waldek.

The second was a little more recent:

In case of an emergency

(like you keep running out of books)

There was the number, and signed, ck.

I almost said he should give it a Goddamn rest, but he got there, easily, first.

“Read everything she gives you, but always come back to these.” His eyes were fierce and firelit. “And then one day you’ll know. You’ll know to go out to Featherton, to dig up the old TW, but you’ll have to get your measurements right, or you might dig up Moon, or the snake….” His voice became a whisper. “Promise me, Matthew, promise.”

* * *

—

And so it was.

He left us late that evening.

We watched him walk, down the porch, across the lawn onto Archer Street, and our lives were left without him. Sometimes we’d catch a shadow, or see him walk through the streets of the racing quarter—but we knew it was never Clay.

As the years climbed by, I could tell you so much:

We all had lives of our own.

Every now and then there’d be a postcard, from places he must have worked in—like Avignon and Prague, or later, a city called Isfahan—and of course they were places of bridges. My favorite was from Pont du Gard.

Here, we missed him with every minute, but we couldn’t help being ourselves; the years spanned out to eleven—since the day our father had come, and asked if we might build a bridge.

* * *

—

For Tommy in that time, he grew up.

He went to university, and no, he isn’t a vet.

He’s a social worker instead.

He takes a dog called O to work with him (you should know by now what it stands for), and he’s twenty-four years old. He works with tough, hard kids, but the lot of them love the dog. His pets all lived forever, of course, or forever until they were gone. First went the goldfish, Agamemnon, then T, the marching pigeon, then Hector, and lastly, Rosy.