by Scott MacAulay
Evan and his yellow Fiat disappeared while stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge. The fog was thick that morning.
Evan’s wife told the police he had been unsettled for weeks, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, but wouldn’t say why. She’d tried gently coaxing him out of it with kisses and hugs, and whispers of naughty things in his ears. She tried stamping her feet, speaking harshly, telling him even the cat was distraught.
The driver behind Evan’s yellow Fiat, Mrs. Yarlkowski, said she last saw it just before the fog turned thick as smoke and the traffic stopped. She couldn’t see the front of her own car then. About ten minutes into the standstill, the fog lifted enough for Mrs. Yarlkowski to see the yellow Fiat was gone. There was a car length between her and the next automobile. A Fiat is a small car and she could only guess its driver had managed to get onto the sidewalk immediately to her left and driven away, but there was a sidewalk guardrail between pedestrians and motorists and it was intact. On her right, cars were tightly jammed.
The police searched Evan’s house, his locker, his desk in the cubicle from which he worked for most of his adult life at the Liberty Insurance Company. In the desk’s bottom left drawer, beneath the remains of yesterday’s lunch, they found a child’s baseball glove and a yellowed newspaper clipping, both from the 1960s, but Evan’s wife and co-workers recognized neither.
The clipping told of a magician who, forty years ago to the day, said he’d make the Brooklyn Bridge disappear, but failed. In the photograph of the watching crowd was a little boy bent over to fetch his dropped baseball glove.
– Scott MacAulay is a former educator and community development worker who now devotes his time to writing poetry and short fiction. His work has been published in The Antigonish Review, On the Premises, and Bywords Magazine. He resides in Ottawa, Canada.
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