The Widow's Bridge

About

In Ostrey the dead cross the river to be buried, and they cannot cross while they are still carrying something they failed to say. Only the bridge-keeper can hear that word, and only she can deliver it. The price is exact: for every word she carries, she loses one of her own memories of the person who gave it to her. A stranger's word costs nothing. Her mother's word cost her her mother's voice. Ceriad Mabb has been keeper for eleven years and has delivered four hundred and six words. Fourteen months ago her husband drowned upstream and never arrived at the abutment, which is not supposed to be possible. In the autumn he arrives — far too late, worn thin by whatever he has been doing in the meantime — with a word for her. A keeper cannot deliver a word to herself. Meanwhile the town's death-priest, who has loved her for six years with complete propriety, signed that drowning as an accident when it was not. A quiet, cold fantasy about grief with a rule system that hurts: the abutment filling up as she stalls, the specific texture of a memory going, a marriage examined by a woman who is losing the evidence of it while she examines it. The love triangle has three real positions and no correct one. Desire is frank and closes the door; the violence, when it comes, is domestic and brief. Five endings, and the only one where he crosses is the one where she will not remember why she is standing on a bridge.

Cast

• Ceriad Mabb protagonist; keeper of the Ostrey bridge
• Ilyan Mabb her husband; fourteen months dead, arrived late
• Jorun Halle the town's death-priest; keeps the register
• Annec Mabb Ceriad's sister-in-law; keeps the inn and the town's opinion
• Sabel a girl of nineteen apprenticed to the bridge
• A Alderman Voss the town's authority; pays the keeper's stipend no portrait yet