FOR BRIDGET
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
The ringing of the phone held the quiet evening by the throat. The loud sound came from the uncurtained windows of a little lone house sitting among the maples and the oaks where, if there was anyone at all around, they would see two of its inhabitants--a professor and his cat--seemingly in the middle of an argument.
The cat was the more relaxed of the two. He was swinging his tail and calmly turning his head to follow the animated professor who, with his mouth and chin covered in blood, was swinging his arms with a vigor that could only be matched by a determined hummingbird. The professor was clearly shouting something as his mouth was opening to such an extent that the spectator would have had no choice but to be impressed by the width of that orifice. But whatever he was shouting was overpowered by the incessant ringing of the phone.
If it weren’t for the loud commotion, the countryside evening would have long since settled into sleep. It was still early in the winter season--before the snow had taken over the trees’ limbs--and the red convertible, which should have been hibernating in the garage, still sat out front. A group of squirrels gathered on the soft top for warmth and watched the theater of the uncurtained windows. Even they, who usually pay no attention to human matters unless, of course, it has to do with a piece of bread or some other picnic leftover, were pulled in by the action.
And just as the clouds were preparing to snow for the first time this season, the ringing of the phone stopped. Silence. Not even the wind. The theater stage of the uncurtained windows was now empty.
Then a snowflake fell. A squirrel twitched its tail. The treetops rustled. And the door of the little house swung open. The professor, wearing very fashionable red socks and no shoes, tripped over his cat as he ran out. The squirrels scattered before he reached the convertible. Then he revved the engine and tore up the ground as he pulled out onto the narrow road and was gone. Only a trail of blood drops on the ground and the red embers of the car’s taillights remained in the dark.
It was a calm evening prior to that awful ringing of the phone. The professor, having just added a couple of logs to the fireplace and having sat down with a cup of tea as strong as coffee, was immediately distracted from his students’ essays and, leaning back in his chair, began fantasizing about Bridget.
Prior to that phone call, the professor and Bridget had been, in simple terms, very happy together. Indeed, before that awful ringing which jolted the professor out of his daydream and out of his seat, they had even entered a passionate renaissance--as fierce as the fervor of enamoured youth in Shakespearean tragedy, yet as delicate as the petals of a spring snowdrop.
It’s true, the hand of time, which is coming for all of us, had smudged what had once been their handsome looks. Boyd used to be tall, with a strong brow and jaw, but now the skin had melted a bit over the years. And his thick, wavy hair had once given him the look of a Greek god, but now it more closely resembled the slicked-back hair held together mostly by sweat and a certain hard-earned vigor of the Greek men sitting on the street corners in Athens during economic downturns, drinking coffee or raki and playing cards. And Bridget--that petite little thing--with her small mouth and pointy chin and huge wide-set eyes complemented by huge wide-set ears (which, really, was very convenient for her glasses and made her a favorite at her optometrist’s office) used to be as cute as a little mouse, but now, too, her hair was thinning and the depths of her eye sockets were more pronounced. But none of that mattered, for they possessed the gift of love: to Bridget, Boyd was as handsome as Dionysus; to Boyd, the elderly mouse was a seducing lioness!
And because of this love, built upon a marriage of over fifty years, they had retained a youthful sparkle and a certain ease of movement in their demeanor which gave everyone who came across them a sense of joie de vivre and a lightness of being. And though their spines suffered from the usual aches of age, their pillows were regularly fluffed during enamoured late nights and carefree weekend mornings. Indeed, the appetite of their passion could even make a virile lion, with his nose set on the fruitful scent of a young liones, feel a pang of jealousy and awe.
But we are doing a great injustice to our hero by going on about his and Bridget’s physical appearance and their insatiable desire. For, what they valued most about their marriage was each other’s intellect and their shared love for American history and literature. And there really was something to be proud of: our intellectually vigorous lion and lioness, apart from having built a little home out in the oaks and maples and having raised two kids who have long since made them empty nesters, were also well respected professors in the near-by town’s renowned Kale University. Like a loving father, professor Boyd Cockburn led his pupils through the meandering cavities of the history of this our great country. And professor Bridget Cockburn, like a caring mother, fed her pupils hearty portions of American romanticism, transcendentalism, abolitionism, and the rest of the early American literary -isms.
Often in the evening they would take their red convertible out for a spin to the nearby brewery for a cider and an ale, and for hours they would pour their souls out to each other about the moving character of Thoreau’s bean field and his brave refusal, in protest against the government, to part with even a single penny in taxes on his accurately tended-to crop, which he cultivated with such valor and candid expression of American individualism--all of it fully sponsored by his best friend, Emerson. And with what honor old man Franklin served the indispensable role in convincing the Parisian court (très en vogue) and the powerful--though somewhat lacking in fiscal and moral probity--Louis XVI to support the courageous Yankees in their fight against their own monarch lacking fiscal and moral probity. And the vivacity with which Franklin spun out documents and agreeable agreements with the country while spinning the delicate hands of the ladies of the Parisian court (très en vogue, indeed!) in dance--and later spinning them around in the privacy of Versailles’ boudoirs as they giggled and purred with delight. And all the while as they talked, Boyd would lean over and whisper to Bridget what he would do if he was Franklin and she was a Parisian coquette in the Versailles boudoirs, and she would giggle and playfully shove his shoulder and bite her lip.
And always they would tell each other how they felt, what they thought, when they planned to have breakfast, and who had said what to them at work. They shaped their lives in whatever way brought them closest together—if Bridget wanted to start rollerblading, Boyd would buy two pairs and free up a Saturday so they could blade together; and if Boyd felt a sudden itch to travel to India, Bridget would, without question, begin researching where to stay, what to see, and when to go. They lived as aligned with each other as they could, and this marital foundation made them happy and free with one another. That is, up until that phone call.
Which brings us back to the evening Boyd and Bridget, in an unusual manner, were spending apart. Boyd was at home. It was a quiet evening for our hero. The window was slightly ajar, and their old cat, Edgar (in honor of Poe), with whom the reader has already had the pleasure to make acquaintance, sat on the edge of Boyd’s desk and watched the early winter breeze pull the last maple leaves off of the branches. The fresh air wandered into the warm room where a fireplace crackled with pine and a kettle was beginning to whistle.
Now the author simply must direct the reader’s attention to the walls. The Cockburns had a keen eye for interior design and, understanding that walls are the backbone of a room, they put a great deal of effort into curating the composition.
To start, white wainscotting ran along the perimeter of the room, covering a third of the wall. Above it, a bucolic life unfolded in the blue toile wallpaper depicting pastoral scenes: a frightened young girl chased by a goose, a beautiful woman--with curls framing her face--milking a goat, two little kids splashing in a shallow stream. And covering the pastoral scenes were photos and portraits. A black and white photo of young Bridget with their little boy and girl on her lap smiling on a park bench. Next to the photo--a portrait of Benjamin Franklin conveying both gravity, as he puffed his cheeks and pursed his lips, and softness that gave him a seductive allure in his slightly closed eyes. Then again Bridget and the kids, now much older, helping Boyd put a star on the Christmas tree. Peering down at that photo was the judgmental look of Francis Bacon with his face squished by the stack of lace at his neck and the tall Tudor hat. Next to Bacon, the handsome Isaac Newton with an angelic look and long curly locks--which practically begged someone to brush their fingers through them during a tight embrace--turned toward the portrait of the heartthrob Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had a sparkle in his eye and a smugness in his sharp nose, and he cared not for the photo next to him of Boyd and Bridget, now silver-haired, with their grandkids at a lake enjoying the sun and sandwiches. But center stage, in the back of the room above the mantle, was given to the cerebral seducers Washington and Locke. They faced each other with their rosy cheeks, snow-white hair, and half-closed eyes, and looked as though any minute now they might leap out of their frames into each other’s arms and land the most passionate kiss on each other’s puckered red lips. Alas, their desire was destined to remain unfulfilled, for a print of Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence stood between them. And thus the trio, like the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, watched over the living room and blessed the intellectual pursuits of its inhabitants.
The current intellectual pursuits of Bridget consisted of leading her graduate students through a Moby Dick reading marathon. She was gone the whole weekend and should have been coming back home any minute now. It was a tragedy, as the reader will soon find out, that Boyd didn’t come along for the reading marathon. It was the end of the term, and he had to grade papers.
Professor Boyd Cockburn, our scholarly lion, was very hard at work. He worked so hard and engaged the muscles of his mind so intensely as he banged his two forefingers on the keyboard writing out comments to his students, that his mind somehow, without his notice, had actually even managed to slip out of the whole process and was busying itself with a day dream.
His private mental escapade was inspired by a student’s paper on the road to the constitutional convention. That paper, arguing that Washington’s canal system plan highlighted the inability of the Articles of Confederation to regulate interstate transportation and commerce, had at first pleased our professor immensely as he was not at all impartial to the topic of public transportation, particularly the vintage kind. He, just as, curiously, almost all men who reach his ripe age, developed a certain craze in his eye and an adoration for the engineering genius of big machines and systems: trains, steamboats, canals, and so on. (He did, afterall, have a collection of model trains running through the back room of their house, and had even built an entire small town in miniature around which the train would run, including a mini version of their Craftsman-style house, with him and Bridget sitting on the front porch).
Reading the student’s paper, our Greek god nodded in agreement every once in a while and let out a grunt--such as, again, only men develop after the ripeness and (our hero would argue) heightened reason that comes with age--of approval. But then the student, as he described the canals, suddenly became a poet: “Virginia’s fertile terrain is firm but yielding. The deep canals would have coaxed her channels open to let the waters flow freely from one end to the other, bearing the most fruitful of enterprises and a bountiful economy for the virile and young United States. Alas, under the Articles, the potent United States was like a cuckolded rooster sitting in a cage among a flock of hens.” The professor raised his eyebrows, or to be more exact the eyebrows raised him as he could never really control the contortion of those bushy things, and as he let out another grunt he was seized by a cough.
Once our lion’s coughing fit passed and he had sufficiently cleared his throat, he realized that a warmth had filled his chest and the burst capillaries on his cheeks had filled with blood. Our hero blushed. The student’s vibrant descriptions of the early days of this our great country had the most curious effect on him. And although he and Bridget had not ventured into any, ahem, cuckoldry activities in the privacy of their intimate evenings, the reader is put into perhaps an uncomfortable position of having to find out that Boyd even surprised himself that his heart had skipped a beat at the thought of this peculiar activity, and the warmth in his chest had now traveled down to his abdomen and--“goodness me!,” he thought--even lower down still to the fertile crescent. A threshold crossed and there was simply nothing that he could do other than give into this amorous feeling.
He leaned back in his chair, propped his feet up on the desk, closed his eyes, and pictured Bridget’s innocent, mouse-like face and the cute expression she would give him when she walked through that door any minute now. But heaven only knew the raw desire that lay behind that innocence! All he had to do was walk up to greet her, and she would grab him by the collar and pull him into a kiss. And yet she would do so with such delicacy and elegance that even her sharp nails running through his hair and across his scalp would make him burn with a pain so delicate that it would boil his blood with desire. He would pick her up, and she would wrap her legs around him (here, our hero forgot all about his lower back problems) as she took her jacket off, and with his hands on her thighs he would reach for the hem of her skirt, sliding up and…
His heart nearly exploded at the ringing of the phone. Boyd jumped up from his chair so high that, on the way down, he missed the seat entirely and fell right onto the floor, bumping his tailbone so hard that his teeth smacked together and the corner of his tongue, unfortunately pinned between them, was bitten clean off.
The hardworking phone, even if it had wanted to somehow help Boyd, only knew one thing: how to ring. So it dutifully rang as loudly as it could as Boyd, like a bright piano accompanying a tearful violin, coughed and choked on the piece of his tongue. Thus the duet of Boyd and the phone resounded through the house like a Beethoven Sonata through the Carnegie Hall, and Edgar the cat, like a dedicated philharmonic audience member, with pupils as wide as the eye would allow and ears as rigid as a soup spoon, turned his head and attention to the duo and thought… Well, we could only imagine what the cat thought.
The grand finale came when Boyd finally managed to cough up the damn thing and spit it out, along with a handful of expletives (which were so unbecoming that the author must spare our hero the embarrassment of the readers finding out what he is capable of), first directed at the phone, then at his tongue, then at God, and finally at everything in between. He even somehow managed to pull Washington and Locke into the mix--who, frankly speaking, were not paying any attention to our distressed professor, being far too busy admiring each other with an intensity and desire that even Bridget could not have mustered.
“Goddamnit! What do you want?” Boyd finally got to the phone.
“Boyd?” It was Bridget. He softened.
“Oh hi honey. How are you?” He sensed from the way she said his name that something was wrong, but brushed it off--surely his greeting must have surprised her--and started petting Edgar, who, sensing his owner's anguish, offered the only comfort he could think of: his cute, round head, which was the most perfect shape for receiving pets. But nothing--not even Edgar’s perfect little head--could have prepared him for what came next.
“I killed a man.” Bridget said, and a drop of Boyd’s blood landed on Edgar.
Marriage is a snare. Marriage is a sham. Marriage is a trap in which our love inevitably dies with the realization that our expectation of happiness is a lie! You try and you love and you prepare and you plan, and all of it just gets tossed aside. The rug is pulled out from under you and everything is lost. Gone! These were the thoughts running through Boyd’s head after he made sure Bridget was okay and found out which police station she was calling from.
How could she do this? What about us? What about me? And just as we were getting ready for such a romantic evening! Boyd suddenly felt immense self-pity, which, of course, once he realized he was feeling sorry for himself, turned into self-disgust, which in turn became anger towards Bridget.
He was racing down the narrow country road, his vision blurred, his lap wet with blood. Bridget had run over a man with her car and killed him. She was at the police station, and the police, for whatever reason, were not convinced it had been an accident.
She was always a horrible driver. Horrible, terrible! How many times did I tell her to slow down, to drive carefully, to stop listening to those awfully distracting audiobooks? All of our life we built together and for what? Nothing. What does this mean for us? Will I still know her, understand her, the way I did before? Will I see her the same as I always have? Or as a stranger now--someone I can no longer understand or relate to? And what about our intimacy? Will we ever connect as deeply as we once did?
The small cabin of the car felt stuffy and hot. Boyd dropped the top and rolled the windows down, though the snow was coming down hard. Cold air and snow whistled past him.
He caught his breath. The cool calmed him, and he eased off the gas.
The purest form of love, he thought, is selfless. But, oh Lord, how to be selfless when I am a person? Marriage is a snare, and any relationship that we enter is a snare, because we must surrender a piece of ourselves for the sake of the other. Yet both must surrender equally. That is the beauty of a union.
And what is more, our beloved may at any point ask of us something abhorrent, something disgusting, something so out of the world that we may drop our jaws and walk around as though in a fog. Still, after reflection and conversation, the request must be granted. And not so that we may hold it over them for the rest of their lives, nor as leverage for our own desires, but as an act of selfless love--with an understanding that we may be just as open about our own wishes. This must extend to every corner of our life together. If we are woken in the middle of the night by our spouse asking for a glass of water, then surely, without questions, it is our duty (as it would be theirs) to get the drink and kiss them on the forehead and ask if all is alright. And yet it is equally our duty not to abuse our spouse’s commitment to selflessness. We must never request such a demand that we know would break their spirit, and the granting of which would be so inconducive to their particular character that it risks forever changing them and our marital union. Boyd knew this, and he felt anger that Bridget, in disregarding his warnings to drive more carefully, had acted recklessly and placed their union at risk. Now they no longer shared the same experience of the world; they no longer looked at life in the same way.
As Boyd reflected, he suddenly noticed something up ahead on the side of the road. It was small and brown and moving. He squinted. Is that Edgar? No. Yes. How? No, it couldn’t be. He leaned forward, keeping his foot steady on the accelerator. Is that a raccoon? No--it really does look like Edgar! But how could he have outraced the car? Sure there are curves in the road, and Edgar can run as the crow flies, but it just doesn’t make sense. Then Edgar--or the raccoon or whatever it was--darted across the road and straight beneath Boyd’s wheels. Boyd screamed and expertly shut his eyes and, like a Formula 1 racer, whipped the steering wheel and slammed on the brake as he hoped and prayed.
Boyd’s head bumped hard against the roll bar as the tires screeched and the smell of burning rubber rose up through the air. When our hero opened his eyes again, fully nauseated, Edgar was already running through the field on the other side of the road and Boyd, having spun all three sixty degrees, was somehow back on course speeding down the road. Thank God, he thought, watching the little brown dot disappear in the field, but when he looked back at the road he saw a man walking out in front of him. In the commotion with Edgar, Boyd didn’t see the pedestrian taking a late-night walk, and the car, having so elegantly handled the spin, was now heading straight for the man.
Boyd lifted his foot off the gas, about to press the brake, when suddenly everything clicked.
I must kill him.
It was the only way to save their marriage. The only way to again see eye to eye. The only way to understand each other.
The cold air felt good. The gas pedal felt better. He gripped the wheel hard and leaned in. He sped to save his darling, whatever awaited him on the other side of the road. And just a handful of seconds away from the man, he realized, No! Bridget killed a man by accident. She’s not a murderer. I am not a murderer! And slammed his foot on the brake.
But the car didn’t stop. Instead it lurched forward and slammed hard into a thick oak, squashing the man like a fly. The sound of the crash echoed through the trees. Then silence.
The red car with its red taillights looked on as blood soaked into snow, and an easy cloud of smoke rose from under the crumpled hood.
Boyd, in the confusion of the moment, meant to press the brake but--an honest mistake--accidentally pressed the gas, and killed the man.
He must have looked insane when he entered the police station, judging by the fear that flashed across Bridget’s face the moment she saw him. His hair was whipped back and frozen by the wind. His face, the front of his shirt, and his lap were soaked with blood. His eyes were bloodshot. His hands were cuffed behind his back, two officers gripping his arms. And, of course, he wore no shoes--only a pair of very fashionable red socks.
But he held himself easy. He met Bridget’s searching eyes and gave her a smile and a slight nod. Her shoulders relaxed. And she nodded back.
Yuliya Monastyrska is a writer and a lecturer of business at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She loves traveling around the world, her favorite places she has visited so far have been Greece and Argentina. She grew up in Ukraine, and moved to California when she was nine years old.
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