MicroHorror

Through the cracks, dark water swirls. I move and the swing bridge stirs beneath my feet. Wooden planks creak as if woken from a lifelong sleep.

I step towards the middle and the bridge sways. “Swim, sis,” I can hear him saying while gripping my ankles. He swings my body in time to the bridge’s motion, singing, “Swing, baby, swing.” Terrified, hanging upside down, my eyes look at a torrent of winter water crashing over boulders only yards from my face.

He’d taken me by the hand and led me over dunes, through high hawthorn to this brooding place. In the near distance, jagged ruins of a castle edged the top of silver birch like a gray, disintegrating crown. He said he was taking me to see the Fairy Queen that lived in the castle. He said she’d grant me three wishes, and while we walked, he told me to consider those wishes very carefully.

The memory of that day is etched upon my mind and, as time has passed from childhood, young womanhood and into middle age, that memory still haunts my daily thoughts.

“You’ve got three wishes, sis.” I can still hear his cruel tone as if it’s the same cold November morning. Above the sound of rushing water that had coursed and still courses its way down from hidden hills, he kept chanting, “Come on, tell me your first wish.”

I sobbed and pleaded with my brother to lift me back up onto the bridge. “It’s a dunking, maybe drowning or three wishes.” He laughed, his laughter breaking with puberty.

I squirmed and continued to plead and he said I looked like a fish dangling on a hook. “Three wishes, little sister. What will they be?”

“I wish you were dead!” And as I uttered that wish, terror engulfed me. Stomach cramps curled knots inside my belly. Then I felt his hands winch me up from ankles to knees, to thighs until I sat panting and weeping on these planks that now creak beneath me.

On the way home, he told me not to tell my parents. It was only a game. Tell them that the bruises on my legs were due to falling off a wall. Subdued and frightened, I agreed. Months later, my brother was sent away to boarding school after smothering our pet dog. Then he went on to university and I hardly saw him after those unhappy days.

Now, in my hand I hold the urn that contains his ashes. My brother died in prison while serving a life sentence for killing his wife and daughter.

“Swim, brother, swim,” I say as I empty the urn and watch those gray particles that once were his body and bones engulfed by hungry water. “Swim for your bloody life, Simon.” I cry into the icy wind.