/lit/ - Literature

>>10589149
Posted this a week or so ago, not sure about it but still keeping it. Basically the idea was to write a story within 1500 words or less. This one takes place in three time periods with three writing styles: before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War, with the bridge the constant thread between them. Still haven't finished the third part so keep in mind it's unfinished.

1/3
There is a bridge in the town. It arcs above banks of baked sandstone that hold the sun in their veins. A river runs beneath.

It was a Sunday in spring, and the air was drowsy with the fragrance of orange blossoms. The sun was a lozenge melting on the tip of the tongue, shedding its colors upon white cloudbanks. Those long spring twilights instilled in us a sense of lethargy and urgency at once, like a ripe fig drooping on the branch. And so we all rushed out of doors—but did little else but pass the time, measuring the hours with coffee cups and bowls of chocolate at the Café Ernesto, strolling back-and-forth across the bridge, throwing stones at the storks high in their belfries while the bells chimed and the pale streaks of cloud revealed their tooling of gold. That day I had my first cigarette, and the white vapors flew up to meet the evening moon.

When the dusk had come and gone and the last bells had tolled we perched ourselves upon the bridge’s stone rail and watched the stars. She wore a cloche hat and a ruffled floral dress. We talked about the future—she boasted of the wedding gown her mother had worn that all of the town’s women had sown together, and the mantilla that had been crafted with such precision that it spanned the exact length of the bridge and not a cobble more. I kissed her then, for the first time. She tasted like smoke. She laughed, and I begged her to stay. But her mother wanted her home—she said I was a rabble-rouser, and she was probably right. Luck had it, however, that we lived at opposite ends of the bridge, and so our dalliances were always played out of the sight of peering eyes. “Dream of me!” she called out from across the bridge, bathed in the gilded light of a streetlamp, her face obscure. Then she was gone, and the bridge was quiet beneath the stars.