An Excerpt from “The Incurables” by Mark Brazaitis

Tales for the Spooky Season

Mark Brazaitis’s ten short stories of The Incurables limn the mental landscape of people facing conditions they believe are insolvable, from the oppressive horrors of mental illness to the beguiling and baffling complexities of romantic and familial love. This collection of literary fiction expertly evokes sympathy and provides insight into the lives of various characters in a small Ohio town.

Sheriff Lewis woke up before his newspaper was delivered. He had a cup of coffee in his kitchen, which overlooked his back yard. Thirty years ago, it hosted a swing set and sandbox. His two boys were now grown and gone, his older son in Hong Kong, his younger in Paris. Before the suicides, he had never felt especially sentimental, at least as far as he noticed, but as he recalled his boys playing in the yard, child raising seemed an easy and ever-joyful task. He could secure his children’s happiness simply by giving them a push on the swings. He could secure their safety, a bruised knee or scrape on the arm notwithstanding, by building a fence around their play area or, in the absence of an enclosure, by being a moveable fence, keeping them contained. 

Now this, he thought. This is out-of-control death lust. This is madness.

He clicked on the TV on the kitchen table. On its twelve-inch screen, he recognized the scene immediately: the south end of the Main Street Bridge. A woman with buttercup-blond hair was on live, interviewing people about why citizens of Sherman were throwing themselves off the bridge. Because it was six-thirty in the morning, her subjects were either old people who, having gone to bed before eight the previous evening, were alert and coherent or Ohio Eastern students who had stayed up all night, perhaps in expectation of seeing another jumper, and were delirious.

There were a large number of people in the background. Like spectators at a high-wire act without a net, Sheriff Lewis thought. 

“I think people in this town and in towns everywhere across the country have turned their backs on Jesus,” said a white-haired woman. “What they’re left with is the devil or self-destruction. Maybe self-destruction is the better choice.”

“I think it’s the Bermuda Triangle,” said a young woman, half of whose black hair was dyed bubblegum pink. Her eyes darted around as if they were viewing a frantic tennis match. “The bridge is haunted, and I bet when people cross it, they hear voices saying, ‘Jump, jump, jump.’ I’m telling you, there’s an evil presence here.”

“I’m willing to bet there are very strong gusts of wind that are lifting people off the bridge,” said a young man who may have been sporting a goatee or may have forgotten to wipe his chin after eating chocolate pudding. “If the mayor of Sherman was willing to put up with some windbreaks, I’m sure we would see a decrease in the number of so-called suicides.”

The last person interviewed was CeeCee, who, after spitting out a few sunflower seeds, said she couldn’t explain the suicides. “My only concern is to stop them,” she said. “Today, I’m meeting with the director of mental health at University Hospital, and I’m hoping to have two volunteer counselors down here by noon. Last-minute therapy might be exactly what people need to keep living.”

As the anchorwoman asked a question of the blond correspondent, the camera showed Sherman police officers escorting groups across the bridge. After they’d crossed, some people chose to recross. The bridge, Sheriff Lewis could see, was becoming an amusement park ride.

As the blond correspondent summed up the situation, using words such as “strange,” “disturbing,” “mysterious,” “weird,” and “wacky,” Sheriff Lewis saw a blue van drive slowly past her and onto the bridge. The color and design of liscense plate weren’t ones he recognized. 

Over the correspondent’s shoulder, in the middle of the bridge, he saw the van stop. He wondered if it was about to release a pack of what he’d heard referred to as “disaster tourists,” people who traveled to the scenes of floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

The van’s two back doors spread open. Out raced at least eight people. The driver’s-side and passenger doors also expelled several people. Whoever was manning the camera stepped past the correspondent to focus on the van’s passengers. The scene was shot in wide-angle: six people on the east side of the bridge, six on the west side, men and women, all of them ascending the black guardrails. Sheriff Lewis’s police officers were at the far ends of the bridge, out of the camera show. 

“Stop them!” Sheriff Lewis shouted at the screen. “Please, God, stop them!”

Standing on the topmost guardrails on each side of the bridge, the van’s former passengers held still a moment, like a flock of birds on a pair of telephone wires, then, in unison, jumped.

“I saw them!” shouted the blond-haired correspondent into the camera. “What you saw on TV, I saw live! I can prove it was real!” It was as if she was trying to convince herself.

As Sheriff Lewis continued to shout, “Stop them! Stop them!” his cell phone rang against his hip.

(excepted from The Bridge)

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