The Bridge Dreamer - A Short Tale - Chapter Two

Under the weight of excitement, exhilaration and a tinge of anxiety she reached out towards a newspaper on the newsstand. It caught her attention initially because there was a man wearing a red shirt (she always liked red) but as her fingers were just about to grip the paper it vanished. What! She looked around, nobody paid her any attention; she looked up to see if anyone was guarding the newsstand, there was nobody there.

What strangeness was this?

A bolt of panic. ‘This is it, you’ve lost it,’ she blathered out loud.

Quickly, she tried to compose herself, screwing her eyes up tight, inhaling deeply and blowing her cheeks out with her lips locked tightly together, rather like when you’re about to jump into a swimming pool for the first time and you know it’s going to be cold. This helped her, she didn’t know why; maybe it was because she didn’t end up in icy cold water? Who knows, but she began to think clearly again. She looked back at the stand and there it was! The same paper! In the same rack, looking exactly as it had done moments before it vanished. Only this time...this time an image of herself looked back at her.

As much as people may think this could be a pleasant experience, seeing yourself on the front page of newspaper, she felt jammed, jammed in her own apparent madness.  Yet again, her imagination had not only run wild it had ran straight past wild and into crazy. Please, please, please, please she repeated, not exactly sure what she was pleading for, but primarily to re-emerge from this cul-de-sac of thoughts bouncing around and refusing to settle into anything remotely coherent.

Her breakfast that day (omelette) suddenly came into sharp focus; it didn’t look appetising. As her stomach lurched and she felt herself blush, she then got annoyed at herself for blushing! It had always let her down in the past, yet another thing that she added to her list of ‘wierdo-isms’.  Again, arguing with herself in her head she tried to act composed and picked up the paper. In the image she noted immediately that ‘she’ looked happy, ironically as she'd frowned.  A strange sensation replaced the stomach curdle, it was calm and it was warm and it felt good. Happy at seeing herself look happy she found herself smiling back.

She was standing at a newsstand smiling at a picture of herself in a newspaper that hadn’t existed seconds before. Gulp.

Then, a rush of un-wanted squirminess returned to her stomach. What was going on here? She’d stopped smiling now and her eyes moved up away from her image to the top of the newspaper, it said, ‘News from the Bridge’ in big fat black bold type. News from the bridge? What bridge? Her eyes darted back to the image, and she spotted the small writing underneath was in a completely incomprehensible language. She didn’t recognise a single word. Time was passing and she was suddenly jolted back into reality by the tannoy system in the train station making an equally garbled announcement saying something about a late platform change. Ughhhh, she thought, I missed the train it was referring to and the platform number!  She looked around dazed and utterly confused as people rushed passed her, scrambling to get to somewhere other than here. Her feet were rooted to the spot, her hands clutching the newspaper. At any moment she expected someone to ask her if she was going to buy it. They didn’t. She looked back again to the image, who was this girl? It couldn’t be her, surely she’d remember being in a newspaper? And the bridge, what bridge? Then, right there in front of her, again from nowhere, she saw what she thought looked like a green iron gate, or maybe a post, or something...Her eyes whizzed back to the image once more and she realised for the first time that in the image she was standing on a bridge, a huge bridge made of green steel, a huge church or something in the background.

Where was this place?

   

She knew she hadn’t dreamt of a bridge and for the first time she was sure, one hundred per cent sure that she must have fallen into another person’s dream. There was no other logical explanation. As the last few people sped off, away from her, she knew she wouldn’t be following, she couldn’t even remember where she’d previously been going. All she did know was that she had to find the maker of this dream. She had to find this place that was making her smile, she knew a journey was about to begin, this time she intended on being fully awake.

To be continued...