by John Brantingham
Clare sees the branch lying on the road that looks like it could pop someone’s tire or crack and break a windshield or something. It’s on the bridge over the mostly frozen Chadokoin River. The bridge has iced over enough that Clare doesn’t trust her feet walking home. She’s holding onto the retaining wall to make sure she doesn’t slip. Her mother would yell at her if she came home with black slush on her pants.
She’d run across and pick up the branch before anyone drives down here, but she’s not sure she’d make it across and back. She could imagine the driver, some bearded garbage man smoking a cigarette, and he sees her on the road, fallen down, and so he steps on the brakes but the bridge is iced over so he slides toward her, nothing he can do. She imagines the men hanging off the back screaming as they watch her, nothing they can do either.
This moment is so vivid and real, that it makes her tense up a little even though it’s all in her mind. It keeps her from running out into the streets and getting the branch. She inches her way across until she’s on the other side, and the sidewalk is wet, not icy, and she can scurry on home.
All the way up the hill, the garbage cans sit waiting to be emptied. She touches each one with her lemon-colored mitten. She thinks about the men who pick these containers up. She sings “La Vie en Rose” until she gets home.
John Brantingham (1970-2026) authored twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He received a New York State Arts Council grant and served as Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work appeared in hundreds of magazines including Writer’s Almanac, The Journal, Tears in the Fence, and Confrontation. He was nominated for ten Pushcart Prizes and featured in The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He served a fiction editor for The Chiron Review. For more on John’s remarkable work and career, visit: johnbrantingham.com
Hawaii Pacific Review 