Blackwood Creek runs through the city of Charlotte like a vein.

It has been hemmed in by stone, directed under streets and around buildings, guided from it’s once wild path onto a tract more suitable to the city around it. It bleeds out of Black Lake, and into Otonabee River, and travels through several small cities and towns in the southeast of the province. It is an old creek. Silk-smooth stones line its bottom, the kind specialty gift shops harvest to etch abstract commands on, like Hope and Faith and Friendship, to be placed in the gardens of Charlotte’s many old women, who spend their sunny days outside, wearing down the landscape into something managed and tame. It thins to a trickle in places, and throbs like an artery in others – it meanders underneath nearly every corner of the town.

Because of it, Charlotte is a city built of bridges.

There are six that cross the river, joining what were once two distinct and feuding towns, and symbolize an end to a near century of uneasy proximity. Dover Bridge carries over from Temple Street, which bisects the city into is south and north end – in its centre, the bridge bears a plaque detailing the end of hostilities between Charlotte (West) and Bree (East), and amalgamation. Dozens carry over Blackwood Creek itself, wherever the creek could not be deterred. Some are solid, varnished and tended – others are old and weary, built decades ago by folk who saw a need.

Once it was clean and strong. Children chased frogs and minnows in it’s babble – teenagers ran inner tubes down its current. Once, like Charlotte itself, Blackwood Creek was innocent.

Now the water is murky. Now, it collects things.

Yellow-white froth gathers around derelict shopping carts and rusty old bikes tossed aside by thieves and vandals (hoodlums and ruffians, the old ladies say). A moldering armchair where Blackwood dips under Reed and Sherbroke unravels and flaps in the current. Sometimes you see a lost umbrella stripped to its bones breaking the surface. Pop cans and plastic bags bob along like pooh sticks until the creek swallows them. A child’s shoe; a threadbare scarf caught around a tangle of roots dipping down to drink.

Occasionally, you get a body.

***

“What is that?”

Mark rolled up beside Johnny and peered through the screen of red and yellow leaves hanging over the creek like a curtain. He squinted.

“A sweater?”

Johnny shook his head; his face paled. “And a skirt. And shoes.”

Their eyes met. Without a word, they hopped off their bikes and left them standing on the bridge – green bridge, as all the locals called it, though there was an official name dedicating it to a founder that no one could remember. It crossed Blackwood at an angle where Blackwood was wide and deep running along the bike path. Here, on the far side of green bridge, the trees crowded their branches over the creek protectively, and in full blooming summer you could barely see it, save the sparkle from the sun filtering down.

But it was Autumn, and the leaves were falling.

Johnny started down the root-laden and leaf-strewn slope and Mark followed. He felt a wild impulse to grab Johnny’s hand. Instead he clutched at trees and shuffled along, averting his eyes.

It couldn’t be. It was probably just a bag of old clothes, or something. He felt sick to his stomach just the same.

Sharp rocks made good steps; they pulled themselves between the trees like apes. The ground got steeper as it approached the creek’s edge. Mark looked back. The bikes on the bridge seemed far off. He hoped they didn’t get stolen.

When they reached the bank, Johnny swore. Mark forced himself to look up, despite his hammering heart.

It was a little girl.

Floating face down, suspended and bobbing in the current. Limbs loose and waving. Dark hair dragged back like seaweed. Her shoulders were wreathed in that soapy froth. It looked like she was flying, red sweater flapping like a cape. Supergirl. Between the hem of her skirt and the top of her socks, the flesh was bruised with blue veins. The white laces on her little sneakers had come undone, and as he watched, the left shoe wiggled off and floated away. Mark could see something black, looped around her waist – a rope, he guessed, probably tied to something so she wouldn’t float away.

Johnny reached for a long, thin branch.

“Don’t!” Mark said. He grabbed Johnny’s arm but Johnny shook him off.

“I just want to see something,” he said. He was scared, Mark saw. But he spoke with exasperation and shot Mark a look Mark didn’t much like. It always made him feel small, and stupid.

“We have to call the police,” Mark said. He suddenly felt on the verge of tears. He didn’t want Johnny to touch her. He wanted to hop on their bikes and race out the park, run into his mother’s arms and have her hold him, make him warm.

“Duh,” Johnny sneered.

He took the broken branch in both hands. It was deceptively heavy – the tip wobbled as Johnny struggled to hold it up. His first attempt splashed down in the water three feet from the body; he let out a nervous giggle, and Mark wretched.

“Don’t be such a f-cking baby,” Johnny said.

Mark said, “I want to go home.”

The body was closer to the other side of the creek, but near enough to the middle that Johnny could maybe reach, if he leaned carefully. He hooked his left elbow around a tree, young but sturdy enough to support his 14-year-old frame, and began to feed the branch between his hands, toward the body of the girl.

Mark couldn’t watch. He rubbed his eyes angrily and looked down the creek, under the bridge. Johnny grunted behind him, trying to get a better grip.

Under the bridge was a hidden, lonely place, dark except for the square of light at the far end. He could make out the banks of the creek littered with garbage - cans, flattened and bent; an upturned shopping cart draped with tendrils of ichor, front left wheel askew and spinning lazily. The protrusion of a bike tire, bent in half. Something that looked like a headboard. Other shapes, harder to make out. It was like a dump. The oil-black water bubbled through, building up froth against the debris. The slick of moss or mould on the bricks that made the arching walls gleam. It smelled like a dirty fish tank and felt lost, cold and rotten.

“Almost,” Johnny grunted. Despite himself, Mark turned back to look.

Johnny was holding onto the tree with one arm – the other held the branch over the creek, quivering with effort. Johnny’s face was red; he bit his lip and stretched out his left leg, gaining a few inches in the balance. The tip of the branch touched the girl in the middle. She dipped, pale hands flashing their palms and freeing her shoulders of the sickly yellow foam.

“Okay,” Mark said, feeling an intense flood of relief. “Now let’s go.” He turned and started back up the slope, not caring if Johnny followed, feeling he had somehow got away with something, and just barely. He couldn’t explain it, but each step he took toward the topside of the bridge made him feel light, free and safe.

Johnny screamed.

Mark spun around.

Johnny’s was standing on one foot, arm still hugging the tree – dangling over the water’s edge with a pained look - struggling to keep hold of the branch…

…as the little drowned girl gripped the other end and pulled.

Her hair hung over her face like a shroud; bloated, pale fingers pulled her forward with spider quickness. Johnny screamed again – his voice echoed under the bridge. Mark stumbled back down and wrapped his arms around Johnny’s waist, crying, “Let go! Let go!” but Johnny didn’t, and by the time Mark had wrestled him to the creek bank with a breathless thud the little drowned girl had grabbed his ankle.

“I’m sorry!” Johnny screamed. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Mark felt a spreading warmth on his lap; Johnny had pissed himself. They both kicked out, but she had his foot firm, and kept her head just above the surface of the water.

Mark planted his feet against a rock and heaved.

He managed to pull Johnny back a few inches, and the girl in her deathgrip rose out of the water – her hair parted, and Mark felt all his strength leave him in sheer, blinding terror at the sight of her hollow, blood rimmed eyes.

She leapt out of the water like a salmon upstream, mouth wide and lined with tiny, vicious teeth. She let out a banshee cry and landed on their tangle of legs.

Mark felt her fingers dig into his flesh and he screamed.

And Johnny screamed.

And they kept screaming until the little drowned girl was yanked back into the creek, and their lungs filled with dark, murky water.

***

Adel Finch liked to walk.

These days, she didn’t go very fast. And she used a cane. And on good days, when she was feeling magnanimous, she took long breaks on the benches that lined the many manicured trails around Charlotte. She liked to be outside, even on the nippy days when most ladies her age would prefer to curl up indoors with tea and a warm blanket and watch the afternoon stories.

She liked to have life going on around her. It kept her present, kept her current, when the ghosts were crowding in.

Like the polite young couple holding hands, who gave her a nod as they passed – or the dog chasing a stick, who overshot the mark and came up to lick her offered palm. It was comforting to know that though her time was nearly up, here was life, happening, as it would when she was gone. Just one less old biddy on a bench.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Adel gave herself another year. Maybe two. That was on the days she was feeling fine, anyway – darker days she gave herself far less, sometimes down to the minute. But here she was, still kicking with no more than the usual signs of slowing down. Funny old life.

The care staff at Riverview had begun to put on false-bright smiles when she was around; tell her in chipper tones how good she looked (for her age), how well she was doing (for a lady in her time of life), how lively she seemed (for someone nearly dead). She’d seen it before; leveled at countless other residents as their clocks wound down. After working in long-term care for so long, she guessed some of them had developed a sixth sense about it – the ear that hears the deathwatch grinding.

And she would smile back, and say she was feeling fine, thank you nice day, and grumble to herself how irritating it was to be old sometimes; and to be tired, and completely beneath regard.

The residents at Riverview were free to come and go as they pleased – so long as their weekly check-up cleared them for outdoors. The charge nurse, a tall black man named James, used to say, “Ms. Finch, are you sure?” like he was sucking a lemon, and she used to respond with, “Yes, James,” and barter for her independence with a detailed concession on the path she was to take.

Of course, she always went a different way. Damn them and their wart-worrying. So what if it meant she could pop off in a shady spot where the wild coyotes would be the first to find her. Life didn’t just happen in the parks and on pavement – on darker days, she liked it muddy, and dank, and forgotten like she was, and sometimes would come back with her skirts streaked in dirt and speckled with broken leaves; and the staff used to make a fuss. Then she’d have to bear weeks of chaperoned trips to the park, until she’d earned their trust again; and she relished in breaking it.

This day, James let her go with a shake of his head and smile; he knew by the turn of her mouth she’d be coming back filthy and wild-eyed, laughing at their concern. Adel knew he knew, and gave him a curt nod as she hobbled out the sliding doors. After a few years, you get used to a thing.

This day, she went off the beaten path, and came across two bikes on a bridge.





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