THE TEN OF SWORDS

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August 21, 2008

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THE TEN OF SWORDS

BARTH ANDERSON

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     . . . trembling jangling—he couldn’t tell if it was coming from his heart or the car, and the last thing he remembered with his normal mind, before the revelation broke him, was the sight of Minneapolis’s cute, little, you-go skyline when he realized that someone had hit him, no, he’d hit someone, no, something was wrong with the highway, because it tilted here, and he couldn’t tell where he was in his city, whether he was looking across or down, what had happened to his car, (although, he did note the moon was rising, that fat little orange buddha), only that he’d swerved for some reason because one moment he was going to pass that burgundy PT Cruiser and get in the far left lane where he could sail at 70 mph into South Minneapolis, and the next, a booming crack followed by a bang like crashing garbage can lids and then his shoulder stung and strained against the safety belt strap and faint screaming for someone’s daughter could be heard against an orchestra of car horns, and through his windshield, a vertical drop into the river but his brain couldn’t quite answer why he was looking at the river over the hood of his car, and he thought, “Oh, right, this highway is a bridge and it goes over the river here,” and a second later he was seeing great swaths of bubbles churning in the water as two cars sank together because it was a hot August day and their windows were open so the Mississippi was drinking them deep while a third car was, for some reason, floating merrily-merrily, and he wondered if his own car was about to drop, to hit the water’s surface, if he was watching this all mid-fall, but, no, it was rammed against a guard rail and the blood of the dying bridge was spewing into the Mississippi from an opened artery in its neck, its titanic tail lashing against the terra somewhere up in Northeast Minneapolis, and the man in his suspended Ford wondered if he would ever see anything so heartrending again as the sight of all that luminous blood deigning to mix itself in river water, and he thought, “Did anyone know about this?” and the broken bridge groaned balefully in its death throe, as funeral drums crying for the severed symbiosis began throbbing from the shore . . .

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Barth Anderson’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Polyphony, and elsewhere. His new novel The Magician and The Fool (Bantam Spectra) is a surreal thriller about the world’s oldest tarot deck. Learn more at www.barthanderson.com.

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