Written for Sue & Gerry’s Weekly Prompts –
The One Day Prompt. I have also borrowed
three prompts from TN Kerr’s OLWG #391,
and the reflective image from my amici at
Blog 57. Here’s where the prompts took me.
The old bridge had not changed. Miranda stood at the water’s edge, watching the buildings lean into their own reflections …. pale, wavering ghosts of themselves …. and understood, finally, what it meant to live with someone’s ghost. Pietro was everywhere here. In the arch of the stone. In the way the river held the dying light like something it refused to surrender.
She had come back for the papers. That was what she told herself on the train, in the taxi, in the mirror of the hotel bathroom. Not for him. Not for what remained of him.
The notary had been kind. “He simply fell asleep,” she had explained, her voice soft with the particular tenderness reserved for strange deaths. “He fell asleep and didn’t put out the candle. The curtains caught”. A sentence so simple for a thing so irreversible.
Miranda crossed the bridge slowly, trailing her fingers along the stone. His apartment windows were dark now, shuttered. She remembered standing at those windows together, watching this same river in a different season, when the world had still seemed like a problem they could solve together. They had tried, God knew. Through silences and slammed doors and long beautiful reconciliations that never quite lasted.
“Will it always be this hard?” she had asked him one day, in the blue hour before dawn.
He hadn’t answered. Pietro never answered questions that frightened him.
The river carried the last of the light away toward the mountain. Somewhere behind her, a shutter opened, and a woman began singing …. something old, something without words she recognized.
Miranda stopped at the center of the bridge.
She placed his key on the stone parapet but did not watch as it fell.
NAR©2026
TN’s Prompts: 1. living with your ghost; 2. he fell asleep and didn’t put out the candle; 3. will it always be this hard?
This is “Bridge of Sighs” by Robin Trower
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thank you for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
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