Moon & Shadow 

Sacha Bissonnette

THIS STORY CONTAINS NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION/MENTION/IDEATION OF SUICIDE. IF YOU ARE HAVING THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE, CONTACT THE NATIONAL 988 SUICIDE & CRISIS LIFELINE BY DIALING 988.

As I stand at the edge, I can see what she would’ve seen. She too must have been drenched like this, soaked in a river of sweat. I can feel the pounding in her ears, the quick shallow breaths that make her chest rise and fall rapidly, unevenly. I feel the cold concrete of the barrier. I think her final thoughts, the pondering, the reflection, the meditation, the pros and the cons, the reasons why, the questioning of others, of myself, the words, the ideas, the thoughts, swelling in me, bubbling and bursting under my skin like a contagion, a rot, a pitch-black growth. How did I get here? How did I get here like her? There was just a pull, and a fracture in memory. Like a fever dream, a fugue state. Maybe she lifted one leg over the side. I stand up and look down. I’m drawn to the jump and the drop, to the unnerving inky calm of the dark river below and then to the moonlight. The beautiful and bright crystal moonlight. A silver lining, she might’ve thought.

I watched a documentary about a man named Chen Si. They called him the Angel of Nanjing. The Suicide Catcher. An unlikely guardian angel in a blue Yankee hat, binoculars hanging off his shoulders. He patrols the Yangtze River Bridge trying to save people from themselves. Over four hundred people saved. Maybe if this was Nanjing she’d still be here. But this is Marlow County. Population 60,000, not six million. We don’t have a Chen Si. 

Jenny navigated the world through negative space. She was quiet, but not overly. She would often sit by the air-plant wall in the campus café where I worked. It was busy enough for her not to stand out, but never claustrophobic or too loud. That’s why I liked working there. She ordered green tea most days. Our interactions were short, never longer than they had to be. As her tea steeped she’d share the strangest things. Things that most people would only share with intimate friends. Like how she wished she had a dog because she had just seen a docu series on working animals. Dogs with Jobs. She learned how pets were used in hospitals and schools, how they relieved anxiety and depression. Then she’d say something that threw me, about how she didn’t have the energy to fill her lungs sometimes. Maybe a dog would help with that. They are so damn cute. But she couldn’t have one, since they weren’t allowed in residence, and she had always been mildly allergic.

I grew to like our conversations. Little moments of weird and chaos to break up the repetitive routine of pouring coffees and heating up wraps in the toaster oven. I had never had a relationship quite like this. Someone who, on paper, was not much more than an acquaintance; a regular to have surface level conversations with, who at times felt more like a childhood friend. If I had a particularly annoying or difficult customer she would creep up behind them and do an elaborate flailing dance number. She’d always claim it was some interpretative piece. I’d undoubtedly screw up the order, which would just aggravate the situation. She would text me random dog pics and then I’d look up to see a person who looked exactly like a pit-bull or pincher or basset hound. Jenny looked more like a fox. With sharp, clever eyes, a lean hunger, and a look that could pierce right into you.  

I started to share, too. Like how I was afraid to admit to my parents how I stopped caring about my degree and how I would honestly be content with working the campus café until something better showed. I told her my apartment was too quiet and sometimes felt small, but not in a square footage kind of way. She had a way of teasing it out of me. These were things I’d only share with old friends, but most of mine were at better schools and out of state. 

It had been two weeks and I hadn’t seen her. Odd for Jenny, but I thought little of it. She often had gaps where she wouldn’t show. Then it was a Friday and Jenny rolled in ecstatic, with a bright smile painted across her face. I wondered if maybe her seminars had been cancelled, but what followed truly blindsided me. She had met someone on the Apps. The Apps I didn’t know she was on. His name was Mark. She had never mentioned him before, but they had been at it for about three weeks now. She spoke of him with the admiration and excitement of a doe-eyed newlywed honeymooning wife in Hawaii. “When did this happen?” I asked. “It seems so fast.” She was moving at a speed I didn’t think she was capable of. 

Soon Mark was all that Jenny could speak of and I started to resent a man I had never met. The mention of his name turned my stomach every time it left her lips, and it left her lips often. If I caught her crossing campus, she was never with him, never hand-in-hand like new couples are, all PDA and amorous walks right to the classroom doorway, endless and tender farewell kisses before Introduction to Critical Longing. But over her afternoon green tea, she described a man’s man, larger than life, who was also bookish, a PhD candidate with a soft side and a penchant for gift-giving. Perfectly dreamy. 

There was no space for me in this new life of hers. Her visits became less and less frequent, but her posts on socials were on the hour, every hour. She kept updating her followers on the risings and retrogrades. Venus was rising so apparently it was the right time for Mark to take her to Tulum. I didn’t even know what the hell this guy looked like. “You too good for the café now?” She left me on read. I was on the outside of one of our inside jokes.

She never made it to Mexico. Jenny’s body was found washed up about a mile from Marlow county bridge. According to a few erratic posts, Mark had gotten angry, then Mark cancelled Mexico, then Mark stopped answering. Some time while I was curled up comfortably, asleep in my bed, she jumped. 

Her funeral service was an uneventful, bland, and average affair. That wasn’t fair, because average was what most of the world thought of Jenny, and I knew how wrong they were. There was an acceptable outpour of grief, and that much she deserved. She deserved more. After a few plain speeches and a tapestry of blank faces, you start to crave some poetry and passion. You’re begging for someone to wail in the aisle or throw themselves over her coffin. Maybe people were too focused on keeping it all in. Maybe it was apathy or anger. But how could they not know? Jenny’s loved ones knew. Jenny liked people who shared. Jenny shared.

After stuffing another tiny square sandwich in my mouth, I said the appropriate goodbyes to her mother and father, who I’d just met. They seemed like ordinary, nice people. Maybe he was a tradesman because he had these big rough hands that covered mine entirely. She had these beautiful amber eyes, these quiet little flames, just like Jenny’s. 

“I also wanted to give my condolences to Mark,” I managed to choke out. “Is he here? Would that be alright?” 

“Oh, hun,” sighed Jenny’s mom, her look somehow warm and saddened. My hands trembled, and eyesight blurred behind welling tears. “Jenny had the most precious imagination since she was just a little girl. Such a wild, weird, uncontrollable imagination.” 

Back in the car my entire body was shaking. With every memory of Jenny flooding in, a cocktail of shame and regret weighed down on my chest. Home was seven minutes on the GPS from the funeral. I wanted to crawl into my bed, to curl up and scream. How had I been so naïve? What kind of a friend was I? She hadn’t told me, but I couldn’t tell for myself?

When I hit the red at the intersection nearest my place, my body just gave. The weight in my chest twisted and pressed down with unbearable force, and then I was trapped. I was moving without willing it, my guts firmly anchoring me to the seat, my arms and legs acting on their own. An out-of-body experience. My first thought was that it was the grief. You hear things like “everybody grieves in their own way,” or “people in mourning do the strangest things.” But this was different. Something was pulling me. My foot hit the pedal, the tires spun out a bit, and I was going at a breakneck speed. I missed another turn. A car swerved out of my way. My eyes started to twitch and roll into my skull, and the street faded from grey to black. 

During reading week, I used to drive up to the bridge point lookout most nights. The city has since gotten rid of it, citing safety reasons. It was quiet. I’d have a beer watching the lights in the two residential neighbourhoods flicker off as the tiny downtown began to flare up. Downtown was just a few lonely bars, with a few lonely people. It was the slowest and most predictable drive-in movie, and I’d be watching it by myself. I never got out of the car. I was never fond of heights. I didn’t trust myself around them. I stayed clear from amusement parks my entire childhood. There was always that one friend or relative who could never read between the lines, who thought you were lying or just joking about not wanting to go up. It was an honest fear. 

Now, at the edge, I’m on fire, burning from the inside out. Stuck but aware, like sleep paralysis. I’m not confused about being awake, I know I am, but without any control. My legs carry me over the barrier. I struggle to fight back. To throw myself backwards. To cry out and scream for someone to stop me. Nothing. Nothing but the ledge.

I worry how long it will take them to find me. What my body will look like.  I want to be cremated. If they insist on burying me, for heaven’s sake don’t bury me in the monotonous earth of Marlow County. I remember that there was a guy who once survived the jump, but barely. What would people say? I don’t want this for myself. Would my funeral be as unremarkable as hers? She won’t be there to make it weird. At least I did that for her.

I go over. Maybe I’ll be luckier than that guy that broke into a million pieces. My body succumbs to a numbness and then I black out again. 

I would’ve thought that after the drop, no deeper fear could be unlocked. Then I come to, blind, deaf, and disoriented. I wail but it’s caught in the bone-cold blackness of the river. She too, soaked like this. Was hers a much calmer end, breathing in the frozen black river, sinking deeper? I can only think of Jenny in my final moments. I feel that out-of-body sense again, that force pressing against the pit of my stomach. I hope that it isn’t my last feeling. 

As I hope for life beyond this feeling, the feeling shifts around in my gut. It’s different this time. Warmer. Wait. I’m spun around. The crystal moonlight breaks through the surface, guiding weird in a river of monotonous dark. I am being pushed up, not under. I get the feeling back in my legs. I can kick. I can move my arms. I can pull up. I break through and my lungs fill with the humid warmth of the late summer. I crawl out of the murk, wet and heaving, scraping and cutting my elbows on the jagged stones of the riverbank. I can move my arms and legs, but I let them lie, damp and heavy, as I stare at my saviour, the moon.

I wasn’t supposed to be busy or angry. I was supposed to fill her negative space. I was supposed to pull her off that bridge. I was supposed to be her Chen Si. But this is Marlow County. We don’t have a Chen Si. I had Jenny. She didn’t wear binoculars around her neck. Just those sharp, clever, hungry eyes that could see the things you could never see in yourself.  The weird things that long to be set free.