Flash Friday 8-8-14 "They say you never cross the bridge without seeing the ____" in Flash Friday

“We pitch camp here.”

The sun was hours from dying in the western hills and the site was further from water and rockier than we’d been choosing. Johns jaw twitched like he was going to say something; he didn’t. He girlfriend watched it happen, made eye contact, looked away and started pounding stakes.

I just sat on a rock and took a long pull from the canteen. Karen sat down to my side, pointing 45 degrees west; it’s how the flat parts of the rock lay, nothing to read into it. She wiped the canteen after her pull. I smiled.

“I …”

“Karen, I know.”

She nodded. “They need rest for the bridge anyhow.”

We glanced over at john and “the girlfriend” I’m sure she had a name; john called her ‘My girlfriend” and she was too self-effacing to refer to herself by name at all. They were making busy work, didn’t notice. Internal trepidation, eternal brave face; that’s how they all were, the ones that made it.

Karen always acted like a tour guide, she told me it normalized things, took some of the fear out of it. I almost always smiled and told her that was good thinking; I love her. No reason whatsoever to tell her that normal burned down with everything else, there was no such place.

You can’t cross the bridge without seeing that. For Christ’s-sake the river is on fire.

These tourists --- we take them exactly where we say we will, it’s just not what they think it will be. It’s a survivor camp, but it’s not a commune; there’s no hugging, no warm shower and a hot meal, it’s sallow eyed people who have lost everything working their asses off, keeping alive more out of habit and fear. It’s a soot smeared camp of the hopeless, keeping that brave face pinned on like a hostess at a strip club.

I think Karen feels like I do though; better to face what’s left of the world than to hole up in a chicken coop, metaphorically, when I go I don’t want to covered in metaphorical chicken-shit. I don’t get off on playing the hero, I don’t care if our charges ever make it; I want to cross that bridge over again and over, taunting it to take me or go away; go high or go home.