The Bridge That Forgot What Year It Was

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There was a bridge in the autumn forest that had been built by a man who couldn't remember whether he was alive or dead.
He had been working on it for three hundred years, which seemed a reasonable amount of time to spend building a bridge if you didn't have anywhere particularly important to go.
The bridge crossed a river that had never reached the sea.
It wasn't that the river didn't know where the sea was. It knew perfectly well. It just didn't see any particular reason to go there.
The river preferred to spend its afternoons reflecting castles that hadn't been built yet and remembering winters that had happened a thousand years in the future.
There were clocks growing inside the roots of the trees.
Nobody had planted them.
They were probably the result of some unfortunate romance between a Swiss watchmaker and a forest goddess who had mistaken him for a mushroom.
The clocks had no hands.
They didn't need them.
Time was already everywhere, making a terrible nuisance of itself.
One afternoon a young woman came to the bridge carrying a suitcase full of yesterday.
She had collected yesterday in little glass jars, the way some people collect butterflies or the ashes of dead relatives.
She opened one of the jars.
Out came a Tuesday in October, 1847.
It fluttered around her head like a confused moth, then settled on a yellow leaf.
"That's a very nice Tuesday," said the bridge.
"Thank you," she replied. "I've been saving it."
"Whatever for?"
"I thought I might need it someday."
The bridge considered this.
It had never needed a Tuesday.
It had needed several Thursdays, particularly during the seventeenth century, but Thursdays were notoriously difficult to preserve.
The woman looked into the river.
There were seven different skies reflected in the water.
One contained a moon.
Another contained a ruined cathedral.
A third contained a little boy who had died before his parents were born.
"Which one is the real sky?" she asked.
"Whichever one you're looking at," said the river.
This seemed a rather careless arrangement for the universe.
She sat beneath an enormous oak tree whose roots were slowly winding a clock that measured the distance between two people who had once loved each other.
The clock had been running for six hundred years.
It was still only half past goodbye.
Snow began falling on the far side of the bridge, although it was October on her side.
She watched a snowflake drift across the boundary between seasons and turn into a red maple leaf.
It reminded her of a man she had loved who had gone away one winter and returned the following spring as somebody else's grandfather.
She had never understood how he managed that.
Neither had he.
Eventually she closed her suitcase.
"Where does the bridge go?" she asked.
"To the other side," said the bridge.
"What's over there?"
"More of this."
She smiled.
There was something comforting about a universe that didn't bother inventing a destination.
She crossed the bridge slowly, carrying all her unused yesterdays.
Behind her, the river continued reflecting the future, the clocks continued forgetting the hour, and the autumn leaves fell upward into the branches.
Somewhere in the forest, a small mechanical bird sang a song that hadn't been written yet.
It was a beautiful song.
Nobody remembered it.
Not even the bird.