THE PULL

Taylor developed a slight tremor last year when she’d heard Stetson jumped off the bridge. She’d just seen him the day before, sitting on her porch laughing and drinking a beer. People in town still talked about Stetson, whispered about forest spirits swaying on tree limbs over the creek. Jumper’s Creek had a pull they said, a pull that summoned them like a siren’s song.

Taylor wanted to find Jumper’s Creek, needed to find it, and drove down bumpy dirt roads, crunching gravel under tires until grit turned to patches of broken asphalt and blacktop. She located the Jumper’s Creek Bridge on a two lane road in the middle of nowhere and parked the truck at the first clearing near a trench a quarter mile from the bridge. She swung open the door and jumped down from the truck cab, booted feet landing in briar, then hiked toward the creek as doves cooed in the foggy morning distance.

She remembered last week’s foggy morning when she’d taken a break from the office where paperwork spilled from her desk to the floor. She strolled near lake side shops and restaurants. A bird circled close, down in front of her, low, then fluttered up and flew away. A few more steps and she realized it had skimmed to get a closer look at its mate, dead on the sidewalk after hitting the restaurant’s glass window.

She shook her head as if she could fling the thought into a tree and slogged on through the forest’s weeds and broken branches, tripped climbing over a dirt embankment and fell into a dense thicket. The fog was dissipating as she lay in twisted vines watching a formation of white birds above the trees and wondered if spirits did that, move about in echelons. She crawled out of the vines and brushed off her jeans.

Occasionally she heard a gush or the whoosh of some predator bird, but the forest was quiet except for leaves flapping as filtered sunlight caught her eyes. Slow movement of tree limbs and flights of grey foul were the forest’s overture. When she imagined spirits whispering conversations as the wind moved and murmured, she hesitated, realizing the creek had never been approached from that dense angle, not by humankind.

She struggled back over the embankment and walked the narrow blacktop toward the bridge looking out for feral spirits as branches swayed and bounced in the distance.

The railing, weathered and cracked, stood high. She was certain the county manager won his second term by hiring a contractor to raise the bridge’s railing height. But the pull was stronger than wood.

Taylor’s boots clicked on the frame bridge, a foreign echo. She ran her fingers along the rough and splintered railing, took a deep breath, jumped up and got a grip, hoisting herself high enough to lean over the edge, legs dangled. She looked down over the railing at the creek below, a dried up creek it was, full of reeds. “A long way down,” she said to Stetson, as if he were a spirit watching her. Her eyes searched the reeds as she felt the pull, though distant. “How could you do this?” she said.

Her head felt a swirl and she lowered herself back down to the bridge’s surface. She ran the quarter mile back, panting as she reached the truck and drove through the forest with tremors until she found her little house in the lake side town where she lived at the edge of the forest.

As usual, stray and abandoned cats gathered round the back porch, waiting. She filled a bowl with water and two dishes with food and bent down and scratched the calico’s head. She had once thought about how hard their lives were and grieved as they disappeared one cat at a time. But when the pull followed her home from the creek that afternoon, she experienced disdainful indifference.