The Paper Bridge — Part 5: After
By the time the water fell back into itself, the town wore a skirt of leaves and brooms and bent
fences. People swept in a rhythm that steadied the streets. The bridge thinned to a simple
thread you could only see if you were thinking of it. The humming quieted, not gone, the way a
song stays stitched inside your shirt after you’ve stopped singing.
On the third night the lanterns went up. The streets bloomed with paper: tigers, boats, moons.
Mei hung a plain white lantern outside her shop and tied to it an envelope addressed to no saint
at all. A custom took root as if it had always been there: Paper Bridge Night. You didn’t wait
for floods or magic. You left notes on doorways and stones and banana leaves, and you crossed
to the people who could still answer.
Lin arrived with a suitcase and the look of someone walking across a room she had thought
was longer. She held up a bag of persimmons by way of apology. “After dinner,” she said,
“let’s keep saying what we mean.”
Jun came by with his father, who tipped his stitched cap as if the span of light were still
humming underfoot. They bought a paper umbrella and stood under it on the real stone bridge,
watching lanterns hem the river.
In the days after, Mei could not quite remember the exact shape of the ache she’d knotted to
the light. She remembered only the relief of having somewhere to set it down. Sometimes, on
heavy afternoons when the river pulled shadows long, she would look up from the worktable
and find a new strip of paper waiting by the door, already cut to the right width for a promise.
And sometimes, when wind laid the water flat as a page, a faint crease ran from bank to bank,
as if the river, too, had learned to fold.
