The Orange at the Bottom of the River

Margaret stood on the bridge, the brim of her wool hat pulled low against the drizzle. Three years ago tomorrow, David had jumped from this spot, or fallen—no one had ever been certain. The police report called it an accident. David's mother had called it a tragedy. Margaret called it Tuesday.

The water below moved with the sluggish indifference of something that had witnessed too many endings. In her pocket, her fingers found the baseball—the one David had caught at their first date, back when they were twenty-three and convinced that love was something you could earn through effort. The leather had cracked with age, much like everything else between them.

She pulled the orange from her other pocket, her hands trembling slightly in the cold. Not a fruit, but the crayon she'd stolen from his hospital room in those final weeks before the darkness took him completely. He'd spent his last lucid moments drawing orange circles on paper, trying to capture something he could no longer articulate—some memory, some feeling, some fragment of himself slipping away.

"You're wearing it again," his mother had said at the funeral, gesturing to Margaret's hat. "He hated that thing. Made you look like a detective from bad television."

Margaret had said nothing. Some battles aren't worth fighting when you're already dead inside.

She placed the orange crayon on the bridge railing, watching it roll slightly in the wind. The baseball felt impossibly heavy in her palm. Below, the water continued its eternal motion, carrying away evidence, carrying away time, carrying away everything eventually.

She didn't throw the baseball. She didn't jump. She simply stood there, allowing herself to finally feel the weight of three years of not-grieving, of being the strong one, of moving through days that had somehow accumulated into years. She tilted her hat back and let the rain touch her face. Some endings aren't endings at all—just the place where you stop waiting for the water to give something back.