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166th Weekly Poetry Contest honorable mention: The Menu at the Bridge

by Che Sara Sara

He had been warned, but snow-blind, feverish
from hours of hiking, lost in blizzard winds,
his toes and fingers paralyzed, his cap
frozen into the nest of icicles
that once had been his hair, he found the inn.
No words or stories mattered, only life;
and nothing less than God’s breath on his neck
could stop his feet from climbing up the steps
as clumps of ice fell through the metal grate
and dropped into deep whiteness far below.
His boots put up a fight. A boy in green
appeared, and pulled them off, then led him to
a raw plank table near a golden fire
taller than a man, hotter than a forge.

As movement melted back into his hands,
and echoes of the wind lodged in his ears
subsided, he began to drink. Strong tea
with brandy opened his cold throat and heart.
He ate potatoes drenched in cheese, coarse bread,
a salty chicken soup, and apple pie.
After the meal, the green boy handed him
a menu with four choices: A, B, C,
or D. “Is this a game?” he asked. “A joke?”
The green boy shook his head and without words
informed him that he must decide before
he crossed the bridge. “What bridge is this?”
The boy did not reply.  The hiker slept
on a bunk bed among three empty beds.

That night, he had no dreams he could recall,
yet something fearful woke him before dawn.
A gibbous moon was shining on the snow.
He saw the inn clung to a wall of cliff,
from which a footbridge made of rope spanned
a chasm across a mighty frozen flume
the height of five cathedrals. On the bridge,
three pale men dressed in bones trudged toward him.
They carried axes with a letter marked
on each: A, B, and C. At once, before
they claimed their bunks, before his instinct waned,
the hiker rushed to tell the green-spined boy:
“My choice is D!” The boy led him outside
and deftly pushed him off the precipice.

Published in Dreams & Nightmares

166th Weekly Poetry Contest