When you approach the bridge, you will hear her moans.
The teenagers go to Dead Woman’s Crossing, in search of love and destruction. It’s darker there, on this church hayride night. Flatbed truck with wooden benches and a scattering of hay. Driver crawls to the spot where the woman was murdered decades ago, by the hand of another woman. That’s what the men said.
When you cross the bridge, you will feel her fingers on your spine, cold icing a summer night.
Teenagers, not inhabiting their own bodies, roll their eyes. Eyes that also take in the surroundings, just in case blood beats in the story. The youth pastor’s eyes have been hollowed out. His wife’s face settled into a knowing grin. The dead woman, headless. Who can tell murderer from the murdered?
She will ask you to take her baby across the bridge.
Shadows of trees swell beneath the bridge—hickory, scrub oak. Soil, iron-red, feeds the branches. The baby’s clothes, blood-soaked. The engine fires, wheels scrape toward the end of the crossing. A whine hangs high in the air, highway into the night sky. How easy to follow the legend, ghost the truth.
If you leave without an offering, the woman’s hands will accept your throat.
Something must be spilled. Water, Coors dripped from a keg from one of the parties in the nearby woods. Blood, of course. The woman accused of the murder later poisoned herself. She waits in the branches. On this night, it’s sparkling pink lemonade, spattered from the side of the flatbed. They can always count on someone to offer themselves.
The dead woman will never make the crossing, but the teenagers keep coming back. The ghost has been betrayed by every person she’s met, every story told. They spill what needs to be spilled, hold the hands that need to be held, speak someone else’s lies. They will live longer lives than the ghost, survive this crossing. But they won’t escape. These throats, they’ve hardly been their own. They will never be this alive again.