When I reached the path that led under the bridge, I found I was able to put my weight on my ankle. A tingling sensation mixed with the pain now, and yellow scrill glowed through my skin. Craig was healing me. Still, I limped to the bridge, wincing and letting air out in hisses.
I hiked up a short but steep and slippery slope to where the bridge met land, and I pulled myself up onto the wet and cold steel girder on the western side, hidden from view of the other two bridges. I crawled on my hands and knees out over the water. The lip of the girder was only two feet wide. My knees knocked as I inched forward, and my right shoulder and hip scraped against the concrete of the deck as I leaned as far from the ledge as possible. Wind whistled through the steel. A rusty, metallic smell filled my nostrils.
Water rushed around the concrete pilings below. A tree floated swiftly downriver with a live black bear on it. With wide eyes, I watched the wild creature hurtle by, balancing for its life.
Out of everything I’d seen in the last few days that might have been the most alarming. I truly felt at that moment that the apocalypse was here and now. I started shaking and had to pause, relax my stomach, and slow my breathing before I could move on. The water was close and moving fast. One slip and I would be worse off than that bear.
Ten yards in, I had to scramble through a large bracket to move forward. The mug fell out of my coat, and I almost slipped trying to catch it. I wasn’t quick enough, and it shattered on the girder. Pieces of the mug tumbled down and were swallowed by the river. A large dollop of the glutinous goo jiggled on the girder where the mug had hit. I carefully, slowly gathered the dollop and put it back into my coat pocket, hoping it would be enough.
I crawled on. Pigeons shared the girder with me, some so tame or lazy I had to bat at them to clear the path. For a moment, a seagull hovered in the air beside me, its wings twitching small corrections with the wind.
A massive, floating nest of debris that included logs, a large stump and root ball, two dead cows, and the remains of a house was being pressed against the second piling by the careening current. The bridge moaned here. I resisted the urge to crawl faster—slow and steady, slow and steady.
When a thick layer of blue scrill sprouted on my hands and circulated in on itself, I knew Blanche/Em was close. I carefully reached out above my head and grabbed onto the vertical bars of the short pedestrian fence. Tensing the muscles in my arms, I lifted myself off the girder, feet dangling over the water, and pulled myself up, up, then clambered over the fence and landed on the deck, thankful for all the workouts I’d done at Lou’s house.
The pain in my ankle was gone.
I was amongst a group of large opera singers who belted out notes with emotion, sustain, and tremolo. They didn’t even know I was there. One inadvertently slapped me in the face as she spread her arms and sang to the turbulent clouds above.
Parked a few feet to my right was the old truck with a camper shell my mom had been driving back when I thought she was just a drug addict. To my left was another stage. This one held mimes and people who, by their clothes and handwork, appeared to be magicians.
I broke through the opera singers toward the camper into a small, unoccupied space. The scrill circulated thicker and faster. Breathing heavy from exertion and fear and relief, I plunged my hand into my coat pocket, into the totem that squished around my fingers. I cupped what I could and held it up to my nose. I took in the smell, the look, the feel. I put a pinch in my mouth, and I grafted:
“Dust Mote Guillotine, Tinsel Kitchen Crucible, Oven Air-Karma Dance.”
The camper, the opera singers, the bridge, the storm faded into a large, familiar room with a view of the ocean. I was in the sourdough starter whorl. I was Blanche, wearing a pink polka dot dress, sitting in a leather chair with a Tupperware bowl of starter in my lap. The corruption I’d left behind on my last visit was busy typing at the desk, while Craig’s head peeked out from a large pool of scrill that spread backward from the fireplace, through the wall, and into other rooms. Craig was trapped watching my corruption, transfixed like a cobra in a basket.
A cheese danish sat on the end table next to me. It was a wall, a mote full of crocodiles that had prevented me from grafting to the whorl the last time. I could’ve picked up the knife next to the danish, cut myself, and freed my corruption, freed Craig right then, and exposed all of the Blanche-infected to Arawok’s vomit reflex as I’d planned. But seeing the cheese danish there angered me.
What was Blanche hiding from me?
What was beyond the cheese danish?
I wanted to know. I could always come back and free my corruption after I rode the Ghost. So I began tapping the quick I knew was on Blanche’s heel, and I fell into the track of this whorl’s pain.
A young Lonnie came into the room. “Why are you tapping the Quick?” he said.
“Partly a backup plan,” I said, tapping, tapping, “in case you fail me. And partly because I want to preserve the look on your face for my future selves.”
“What look? What are you talking about?”
“How did you do it? Some sojourner trick?”
“How did I do what?” Lonnie crossed
