The Night at the Bridge

The event at the bridge happened six weeks after the flowerpot. He had been keeping the notebook for most of that time, and he had reached the point where he felt he understood the basic shape of what the power was. He understood it well enough to know that what happened at the bridge was something it could not help with at all.

Not every situation could be fixed by ten seconds.

Eli was coming back from his friend's house later than usual, crossing the old footbridge over the canal, when he saw the boy. He was about Eli's age, sitting on the wrong side of the railing, his feet hanging over the water, his hands gripping the bars behind him. He was not moving. He was just sitting there in the dark, very still, looking at the water below.

Eli stopped walking.

He did not feel the click. The power did not activate. The boy was not about to fall, not in the immediate physical sense that seemed to trigger the rewind. He was just sitting there.

This was different from anything Eli had encountered before. This was not a situation ten seconds could fix.

He walked to the railing and stopped a few metres away. He did not shout or run or make any sudden movement. He just stood there.

"Hey," he said quietly.

The boy looked at him. His face was hard to read in the dark.

"Hey," the boy said back.

Eli leaned on the railing, the right side of it, and looked at the canal. The water was dark and still and reflected the orange glow of the city above it in wobbling lines.

"The water looks weird at night," Eli said. "Like the reflections are the real lights and the actual lights are the reflections."

The boy said nothing for a moment. Then he said: "Yeah."

"I am Eli," Eli said.

Another pause. "Marcus," the boy said.

They stood there for a moment. Eli was aware of his heart beating harder than usual but he kept his voice even and his body still because he thought that any urgency he showed would be the wrong thing right now.

"Is there someone I can call for you?" Eli asked. "Or someone you want me to go and get?"

Marcus looked at him. "Why would you do that?"

"Because you are sitting on the wrong side of a bridge railing at night," Eli said. He said it simply, not accusingly, just as a fact they both knew. "And I would rather not walk away."

Marcus was quiet for a long time. The canal water moved slightly below them. Somewhere in the city a siren went past and faded.

"There is a helpline," Eli said carefully. "I do not have the number but I can look it up. Or I can just stay here with you for a bit. If that is alright."

"You do not know me," Marcus said.

"No," Eli agreed. "But I was walking past and now I am here and I am not in any particular hurry." He paused. "Unless you want me to go. If you want me to go I will go."

Marcus did not say go.

Eli stayed. He looked up the number on his phone and read it out quietly and Marcus put it in his own phone. They talked a little and were quiet a lot and after a while Marcus climbed back over the railing to the right side and they sat on the bridge together until Marcus's mum arrived, because Marcus had called her, which was the thing Eli had hoped would happen but had not been sure of.

When she arrived she held her son for a long time and then looked at Eli over his shoulder with an expression that Eli did not have words for but that he understood completely.

He walked home alone in the dark.

The power had not activated once the whole evening. There had been no click, no rewind, no ten seconds borrowed back from time. He had done the whole thing with nothing except being present and saying the right words and staying when it would have been easier to keep walking.

He thought about this on the way home.

He thought that maybe ten seconds was not always the point. The ten seconds were the automatic part, the part the power handled without asking him. The hard part was everything else. The staying. The noticing. The saying the right thing in the dark on a bridge when you had nothing except your own presence to offer.

He thought he wanted to get better at the hard part.