A piece of flash fiction, Bridge was an equal first-place winner in the 2014 Spooky Story Competition run by SpecFicNZ for Halloween.
You can read the whole story, along with the other winners, here.
Here’s a teaser:
“Take a deep breath,” says the voice in his ear, in his head. But he can hardly breathe at all. His fingers clutch the steering wheel, knuckles white as a cliché, teeth grinding against teeth. The road roars and cracks underneath him, frozen rain thundering on the windshield, running through his eyes.
“Sir, you need to talk to me,” the disembodied voice continues.
He can see the river. Not through this fog of freezing sleet, not through the haze of whisky and beer that has fuelled his waking moments for too many long days and empty nights since, but in the cold clarity at the back of his mind, at the end of that bridge, where it falls away into darkness. It sweeps bleak and hungry beneath the pillars, a torrent in its rage, invisible in the night except to those who have seen it.
Water trickles down the windows, the doors, pools in the carpet at his feet.
“How many people were in the car?” the voice asks again, hollow, coming from far, far away.
He can’t reply. He can’t speak. It’s pointless talking to memories. There was nothing he could’ve done then. All he has left is what he can do now. He presses the accelerator down harder, feels the tyres slide across the rain-slick road. Smiles, a sour thing beneath eyes wet with rain and lined with sorrow.
