Andrea Marcusa: THE TUMMY BRIDGE • Cleaver Magazine

Andrea Marcusa
THE TUMMY BRIDGE

Right now, it’s an old wooden bridge spanning railroad tracks, a rickety structure that’s fun to cross on her way to the beach. Its steep incline causes her car to jump when she zips over it too fast, and then her stomach to lurch into the air. Her two children and husband love the bridge. When she calls out, “Here comes the Tummy Bridge,” they wait in anticipation holding their stomachs and then erupt into gales of laughter.

She presses the brakes, and her husband, who is in the passenger seat, reaches his hand across the gear box onto her knee and travels up her thigh to her bikini bottom and says, “I can’t help it when you pump your leg and arch in that wet suit,” and doesn’t leave her thigh until she swats him away and whispers, “Later!”

After the kids are asleep, she’ll lower herself onto him, the room flooding with a chorus of crickets and the ding-donging of wind chimes outside their bedroom window. The sheets soon a damp tangle, her hair matted, they’ll both collapse euphoric, out of breath, feeling each other’s hearts pounding along with their own. Propped on her side, she’ll trace the outlines of his face, the cleft in his chin, strong jaw line, and touch his dark, thick eyelashes with her pinky.

This is before arrhythmias send her husband’s heart racing and skipping like mosquitos swarming at dusk. Before his stricken look with each erratic beat sets her teeth on edge. Before the arrival of his tan box filled with life-saving morning, noon, and evening pills, colored discs that dull his eyes and puff his lids. Before physicians, five separate times, thread probes up a vein in his thigh to his heart where they make tiny burns, scarring the tissue from which love had once flowed so freely. Afterward, he still climbs the stairs nightly to their bedroom but gasps at the top, the sound thrusting into her like a blade.

This is before sleepless nights spent wondering if she could have foreseen some weakness years ago when, after lovemaking, she held her head to his chest to hear his heart’s reassuring thump, thump, thump. Was there something they could have done?

This is before wildfires destroy the bridge and nearby barns that dot the region and clapboard houses with quaint, listing front porches and baskets of hanging geraniums. Although their home is spared, the charred ruins nearby are sold off in small lots and rebuilt with tract houses and tiny, cedar chip yards. The bridge, remade in cement, now provides a smooth, ordinary ride, no fun at all.

Today, none of these changes have happened. Wildfires and his weak heart are years away, the smell of summer perfumes the air, the motor shifts gears as it starts up the hill, the kids in the backseat chant, “Tummy Bridge!” under a wide, blue summer sky, as fields of corn sway and baskets of pink geraniums swing, and they are still young.

Andrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, CutBank, Citron Review, Cherry Tree, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Glimmer Train, Raleigh Review, and Southampton Review. She studies with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa. Andrea Marcusa’s flash fiction piece “The Tummy Bridge” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.