Help -- Flash Fiction

"Mister?" she called.

He didn't answer.

He couldn't hear her. Too many cars sped past her on the bridge. The noise drowned out her voice and the wind dragged her hair in its wake. Why didn't they stop? Couldn't they see? He needed help.

She'd been there herself. Once. Three years ago. Or was it last year? Or yesterday? Someone had stopped then. To help.

"Please." She leaned out over the railing. "Don't jump!"

They were so high. Her stomach felt hollow. She could feel herself falling. She clutched the railing. All she could see was the top of his head. He seemed intent on the rapids far below them. She had to do something.

"Hey, Mister?" She climbed up on the bottom rung of the railing. She hated heights.

She saw him let go with one hand and lean away from the rigging.

"Mister," She willed him to look up.

He didn't.

The rapids. "Oh, God." Three, maybe four stories below them. She had to get to him. She crawled over the rail keeping her body against it, its chill seeping through her shirt and jeans, her belt buckle scraping against the metal. With her right foot she reached for the narrow ledge. Too narrow for her whole foot. It would have to do.

"Mister. Don't." She moved down to a beam. First her left foot. Then her right. She wrapped both arms around the slanted metal brace. The rumble of traffic and the roar of her own blood filled her ears, pounded through her body. She had to get to him.

"Hey!" she yelled.

He looked up. Squatting there, on the second beam down, he looked up. Thank God, he looked up.

His eyes wide with surprise, he spoke, but she couldn't hear him.

"What?" she shouted.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Please, don't jump."

His brows arched high above his eyes, then furrowed deep into a vee. His eyes narrowed to little more than slits.

"Dammit, Lady. You think I'm a suicide?" He put something into his shirt pocket. "You be still. I'm gonna climb up to you."

She couldn't breathe. She pressed her face against the metal brace and waited.

He hunkered on the beam behind the brace she clung to and touched her shoulder. She was afraid to move her face away from the metal. Afraid to move. Afraid to look at him.

"Aw, Lady." He brushed her hair away from her face. "This wasn't suicide." He pulled something from his pocket. A tiny gold locket on the finest of chains. "This was my wife's. I meant to throw it in the river, but it got hung up." He put it back in his pocket and waited.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Sorry about that woman I married? Sorry, you came to help? Or sorry you're dangling out here over the river, shaking like a leaf?"

He helped her let go. "You're gonna climb back up now."

He grasped her belt as she reached up the brace toward the ledge. "I've got you. You won't fall."

He put his face next to hers and said just loud enough to be heard over the river and the traffic, "I do appreciate the help."


This story was inspired by the 2017 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Competition. We writers were each placed in one of eighty groups and assigned to write a story of 1,000 or fewer words in a genre, a location, and including an object. I have previously posted my submission. This assignment was for a group not my own -- genre, romance; location, a bridge; the object, a locket. This story comes in at 537 words.