Mirage 2016 KILL YOURSELF
Eric Hall
First Place, Fiction Competition Cochise Community Creative Writing Celebration, 2015 The bridge that cuts across the bay of the city is an international symbol. It’s on post cards. Every movie that takes place here always shows a wide shot of the bridge. Everyone knows it, even if they were never here. There are always tourists stopping along it to snap photos of the suspension towers or the skyline of the city or a nice group photo of everyone in their pack. People will walk across just so they can turn around at the other end and head back to their car. Just to say they’ve been there. I was there, man. The night lights of the city breathe life into it. They reflect off the surface of the water and make a pattern of something you’d see in a modern art gallery. Little ripples of orange and blue and yellow breaking and forming a thousand at a time then dying out seconds later and replaced by the constant ocean surf that is there. The bridge was completed in 1937 and was the longest suspension bridge in the world until some ambitious engineers in New York built a longer one in 1964. The main span is 4200 feet long, and the two suspension towers stand at exactly 746 feet. And as it’s a suspension bridge, the deck that pedestrians use is held up by massive steel cables. If one were to break, the extra stress it would put on the other cables could potentially cause them to snap one after the other. The whole bridge would collapse into the bay like a marionette with the strings cut. It’s six lanes across the deck. The people in charge of running the bridge, the bridge people, also change the lane markers during peak traffic hours. So instead of three lanes going south and three going north, four go south into the city during the morning hours when everyone is heading to work, and four go north in the evening when everyone is racing out to get home. That’s clever. The bridge people who thought of that should be proud. The paint they use on the bridge is called “International Orange,” and they are always painting it. They use a special kind of paint that helps the bridge resist corrosion and rust. Special order
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