Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Story Problem

A boy falls from a bridge at a fixed velocity. Another body, flushed, not mine anymore, hits the ground and starts running.

Down there by the river the night was a mask. Half-Moon Bridge we called it. I loved him for his music, his hands. His face, a million leaf-shadows, his hand moving to some music I couldn’t hear. A lurch, a jolt, a wave of nausea. Something in my stomach like those dreams where you’re falling and can’t stop, jarring awake. The pockets of darkness. We’d fallen in. They told me he jumped. Touched you wrong, Mama would’ve said. Kissing cousins, he said, that’s all. They’ve arranged him, a piece of music, piece of art. Suicide is a form of poetry, he said, and I believed him, that night by the river. “Your body,” he said, “you pushed me to it.” I never pushed you, you fell.

You aim a gun-shaped hand at a star, curl a thumb back on a trigger of air and right then, a star falls. You didn’t really shoot it down. Or you wish on a star night after night to see his body carried with the current.

I heard organ music tonight. Six men, a slow motion march. He looked so cold in there, his body already river, his heart a frozen pool, his tangled seaweed hair. They carried that body like a sin. “Let’s get carried away,” he was fond of saying. “I will teach you chemistry, the science of desire, the physics of release.” Now you play the organ, he said, his breath full of beer. His hands moving to a beat I couldn’t hear. Moving to a song I couldn’t bear. I couldn’t have pushed him, I was a dull friction of molecules, silence. Mathematics, he’d say, discreet, discretion. Discrete: the opposite, continuous. A hand saws you in half at a fixed rate of grinding, a wave crashes inside. His bad, ragged breath hangs before your face, broken and sour. A series of discrete equations of loss. Banktellers, the first game, I was seven then, he was thirteen. The River Bank we called it, stones for coins, leaves as play money for the tills. Years later, the riverbank, bank of river, fluent numbers, liquid accounts, an expensive rush of water, deposits, withdrawals, a body carried down, caught for a moment in a fallen tree then breaking away, carried off. A body carried on, heavy with secrets, fluid with freedom.

Seven nights later and there is no music. No fruits hang like earrings from the choke-cherry tree. No voices on the riverbank, no huckleberry summer. No phosphorous moonbreath plays on the water, nothing. Nothing answers back from the blank face on the water, but over and over I question it. The night is a mask and I want to know.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis’ stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Mid-American Review. She recently found out that Stephen King must have read her story, “Sundress,” as he chose it as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2006. She’s still reeling from that possibility.