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Authors: Anthony Barnhart
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mobile standing mirror up against his knees. He works by the sunlight coming through the skylight. Using the tweezers, he pulls the glass shards from his face. He counts maybe fifteen or twenty fragments embedded in his skin. Each yank burns. The blood starts flowing again, and he dabs the tiny yet deep cuts with cotton balls he found in a drawer. Finally, once he has all the glass out and sitting in bloody clumps on the floor, he soaks one of the cotton balls in hydrogen peroxide and dabs it over his face. He lets out a grunt with the searing pain. He dabs his entire face, treating all the wounds—they are everywhere, over his forehead, his eyebrows, along his nose, cheeks, chin, and one nearly sliced his right eye and another spliced his swollen lip. The burning is worse by his eye and lip. He tosses the rag away and kicks the chemical solution on the floor. It chugs onto the tile. He leans back in the chair and takes several deep breaths.
Aspirin.
In a minute. I need a few moments.
Fuck, that stuff hurts. I should have just used soap.
He pops an aspirin as he walks away from the school. He can see the highway from the school entrance. He takes West 19th Street to Highland Avenue, which curves up the same hill that the GARDEN OF HOPE adorns. As he passes baseball fields to his left, he bandages his cut hands. He had already soaked them in hydrogen peroxide and had even dabbed them with Neosporin. My face is going to be scarred forever . That thought doesn’t carry as much weight as he thought it would. He walks into the parking lot of a retirement home and returns to the highway, crossing the knee-high grass. He easily spots the overturned Prizm, and after grabbing the flowers and his bag of tobacco (the cartons had scattered), he sits on the overturned rear of the car and smokes another CAMEL
LIGHT, staring out at the lifeless city. I’m coming, Kira. I’m coming .
III
The I-75 bridge spanning the Ohio River has turned into a nightmare. The Brent Spence Bridge is of cantilever truss design, with a main span of 830 ½ feet; approach spans measure 453 feet. It opened in November 1963, with its two decks—the uppermost deck going south, the lower deck heading north—striped for three lanes each. Emergency shoulders were eliminated in 1986 and replaced with an extra striped lane. Traffic overwhelmed the bridge for decades, and now the man sits in the idling S.U.V. staring at the congested mess. The entire entrance to the lower-most decks is congested, filled with overturned and crashed vehicles. The gentle slope of the highway down to the bridge had become overrun with unmanned cars, and they had all come to a stop right at the entrance to the Anthony Barnhart
Dwellers of the Night
38
bridge. Skid marks went off the road, vehicles crashing below, erupting in explosions of fire: now they rest smoldering in the cold dawn.
He isn’t surprised at the trauma before him. You should have expected this , he tells himself. I-75
was among the world’s most important roadways and the second busiest interstate highway. I-71
was routed across the bridge in 1970, adding to the traffic. But it could be worse . He doesn’t want to imagine how it would look were the plague—if that’s what it was—had struck midday. Most of the traffic over the bridge was due to bursting suburban sprawl, shopping centers, apartment complexes, office parks, and light industry. The bridge had a tendency— had being the key word here, for now there is no one left to use it—to be the bottleneck of Cincinnati. He turns off the engine and gets out of the S.U.V., grabbing his bag of tobacco (into which he had placed the antibacterial ointments and extra gauze), and he grabs his lily bouquet for Kira as well. He lights another cigarette and stares at the carnage. In the dawning light, he can see bodies inside the cars. A single arm, pale white and clammy, lies in a pool of splattered blood near one of the smashed vehicles. Most of the
Aspirin.
In a minute. I need a few moments.
Fuck, that stuff hurts. I should have just used soap.
He pops an aspirin as he walks away from the school. He can see the highway from the school entrance. He takes West 19th Street to Highland Avenue, which curves up the same hill that the GARDEN OF HOPE adorns. As he passes baseball fields to his left, he bandages his cut hands. He had already soaked them in hydrogen peroxide and had even dabbed them with Neosporin. My face is going to be scarred forever . That thought doesn’t carry as much weight as he thought it would. He walks into the parking lot of a retirement home and returns to the highway, crossing the knee-high grass. He easily spots the overturned Prizm, and after grabbing the flowers and his bag of tobacco (the cartons had scattered), he sits on the overturned rear of the car and smokes another CAMEL
LIGHT, staring out at the lifeless city. I’m coming, Kira. I’m coming .
III
The I-75 bridge spanning the Ohio River has turned into a nightmare. The Brent Spence Bridge is of cantilever truss design, with a main span of 830 ½ feet; approach spans measure 453 feet. It opened in November 1963, with its two decks—the uppermost deck going south, the lower deck heading north—striped for three lanes each. Emergency shoulders were eliminated in 1986 and replaced with an extra striped lane. Traffic overwhelmed the bridge for decades, and now the man sits in the idling S.U.V. staring at the congested mess. The entire entrance to the lower-most decks is congested, filled with overturned and crashed vehicles. The gentle slope of the highway down to the bridge had become overrun with unmanned cars, and they had all come to a stop right at the entrance to the Anthony Barnhart
Dwellers of the Night
38
bridge. Skid marks went off the road, vehicles crashing below, erupting in explosions of fire: now they rest smoldering in the cold dawn.
He isn’t surprised at the trauma before him. You should have expected this , he tells himself. I-75
was among the world’s most important roadways and the second busiest interstate highway. I-71
was routed across the bridge in 1970, adding to the traffic. But it could be worse . He doesn’t want to imagine how it would look were the plague—if that’s what it was—had struck midday. Most of the traffic over the bridge was due to bursting suburban sprawl, shopping centers, apartment complexes, office parks, and light industry. The bridge had a tendency— had being the key word here, for now there is no one left to use it—to be the bottleneck of Cincinnati. He turns off the engine and gets out of the S.U.V., grabbing his bag of tobacco (into which he had placed the antibacterial ointments and extra gauze), and he grabs his lily bouquet for Kira as well. He lights another cigarette and stares at the carnage. In the dawning light, he can see bodies inside the cars. A single arm, pale white and clammy, lies in a pool of splattered blood near one of the smashed vehicles. Most of the
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