Bridge of Limbs

The thunderclap was diabolical and fiendish, though the night air glittered with a malicious brilliance, and as he ran beneath the bridge he could hear the wet stone sighing, forming a foggy eclipse beneath his feet. He slowed, he stopped.

The ragged breathing swelled and pulsed around him in a halo of darkness, mirroring his splutters as he fought for air and gulped it down. Everything was quiet, shimmering. By now, the fog had twisted itself into gentle tendrils around his ankles, dancing mirthlessly, beckoning him forwards. He waited inside that bestial mouth and stood fast against the rush of air, forwards and backwards, through the throat of concrete and out again. Entranced by the rhythm, the rhyme of these breaths, he took a single step. The bridge yawned widely, and deeply. The riots had begun—he could hear them screaming, a din that had grown in volume as he rushed away. The voices had followed him. They echoed off the walls of the passageway where he stood, seeming to vaporise into mist before him. Louder, and louder—

He grappled with who he was: a father, and a revolutionary. He thought of his child, abandoned for hours with the woman from upstairs while the striker within him rose up. The two people who could never quite become one were in conflict, yet again, as he stood there, thinking of who to trust for this next move. Be responsible, and stay out of trouble, or return to where he was needed, in a place afire with the rioting. Who was right, and who was rightful? 

Another clap broke through his thoughts, but it was not thunder. This was a dragging, crumbling blister, like rocks chewing on rocks. Again, the sound of bashing. Perhaps the bridge had been struck by lightning, he thought—and then it dawned on him, that lightning couldn’t bring down rock, but men could. With the wind urging him forwards, he sprinted out of the passage and turned left to mount the hill. It was slick with mud from the rain and ran in rivers over his boots. The grass had all but drowned. Glitter was dispersed faintly in the air, though he knew that this was a different kind, specks of white-hot and silver instead of the dull, indigo shimmer of starlight. He could smell it now, too, above the rain. It hung in the air like thick, wet wool.

The voices, the echoing claps of stone, the stench, the specks of glowing ash, the drowning rain, the mud, the fog—it all penetrated his body and flooded his veins with terror and ravaged him. He reached the top of the hill, level with the bones of the bridge that had hidden him, and he saw before him a sight unseen. The pillars of smoke billowed high, factory-fast, choking the sky in a pungent hatred. His feet could not move quickly enough towards the tiny figures circling the shape. The flames were so bright that they blinded him as they licked up the walls and spat out sparks. Closer and closer, until the heat was so unbearable that he staggered to a stop, drenched in mingled sweat and rain. The cathedral screamed into the sky, and the sky roared back. They seemed to mirror one another in all senses. Fire and ice fighting seething red flames with lightning, cracking heat with icy rain, groans of crushed stone with booming thunder, smoke with the smell of water on grass, the taste of ash and the taste of the weather. 

This violent battle went on for what felt like hours. No matter how hard the rain poured, it could not put out the erupting building, the edifice of Christ turned to rubble. The heat was so great that it vaporised instantly, plummeting the watchers in a blanket of mist. He stood there and listened to the popping of glass as the windows began to shatter. Shards of angels were thrown, crunched and congealed, into the crowd, in a piercing attack. This is not what he had hoped for. This was not how he wanted to unite their worlds. 

He thought back to the quiet of the bridge, the stone lips that had encased and whispered to him. Beneath the bridge he was safe from his own destruction, from his paths of riot and rampage. He thought again of his child, and of his two selves, reflected perfectly in the war before him. The revolutionary—the burning cathedral—and the father, the storm. One the violent statement of man, the other an unstoppable force of nature. 

Both lived within him. He watched them fight, and wondered who would win.