Midnight Gossip

It was raining the day she jumped.
Not a downpour, but an all-encompassing gray mist that glimmered on her cheeks and dampened her hair into a halo. They said she stood there at the edge of the bridge for a long time. Nimbly climbed over the rail, slick and cold. She danced on her tiptoes along the concrete edge and gazed, forever, into the blue-black waters. Then she just jumped. Like all the others.
            We had laughed off the stories. They were just stories, after all. Show us the evidence. There were never floaters. Not one body emerged from the river. So we had imagined them: bloated and white, stuccoed with barnacles and adorned with creeping algae. Wet and cold and alone. Extracted by unknown hands, too far gone to even be recognized.
            But it never happened. And so we dismissed the whispers. 
            No one even walked on that bridge. Even—especially at midnight. Why was she out there at midnight?
            They said something had called her out into the dark. An echo of wanting.
Not true. She must have slipped. She lost her footing and clung to the rail, scraped her nails on the rusted metal, smashed her arms on the columns on the way down. She must have screamed in that moment. She must have known then. For whatever reason out there in the night, so far from me, she fell by mistake and let out a sound of terror that wrecked the silence. I could hear it, ripping through the rain and the dark to suffocate and drown.
            I could almost see her face now—like the others—if I stared hard enough, long enough, down into the dark water. She must have slipped.
            Standing on the bridge, I glance at the reflection in the face of my watch.
            I wait, shivering in the icy drizzle that soaks my shirt.
The river reaches its hands into the skies, extending its limbs into the clouds and pulling them down.
            I shift my weight, and adrenaline lightning as my shoe scrapes against the edge. There. That was it. A terrible, awful accident. The horror she must have felt at that moment—when her body tumbled through the rain into the river, immersed, filling up her nose and mouth and the pits of her lungs. The darkness she saw. Such an awful darkness.
            A rush of wind pulls my body away from the bridge, beckoning. My knuckles burn. My grip is tight against the rail. The rest of me strains toward the water.
I glance at the glimmer of starlight through the storm clouds, a freckle of light. I cherish her memory in the spray of the rain, of the churning river—strange and calm and cool.
It was raining the day she jumped. Then again, it’s always raining.

 ***

L.V. Rose (she/they) is an editor, writing coach, and author who writes about monsters both real and imagined. L.V.’s latest work has been featured or is forthcoming in Shacklebound Horror Anthology, The Dark Sire, ScaryMommy, and The Other Stories Podcast. She lurks in the rain near Seattle. Find her on Twitter: @WordsRose