The Bridge of Forgetting

Once they had closed the door to the Palace of Illusions, a winding road stretched out before them. The sky was black, but it wasn’t nighttime. It was the flat darkness of a room with the lights off. Here, in the middle of myth and the Bridge of Forgetting, the landscape was different. Statues were half sunken into the earth. Tall white trees blocked their view of what lay ahead.

“I’m starving,” Aru moaned. “I shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream so fast. Do you have any more Oreos?”

“Nope. I gave the last one to Boo.” At the mention of their pigeon friend, Mini sighed and wiped at her eyes. “Do you think he’s okay?”

Aru wasn’t sure. The last time they’d seen him, he’d been knocked unconscious. That automatically said not okay.

“Even if he isn’t okay right now,” she told Mini, “we’re going to rescue him, and then he’ll definitely be okay.”

“I hope so.”

Two minutes later, Aru’s stomach grumbling had gone from a smattering of sound to giant, growling there’s-a-monster-in-my-belly-and-it-wants-to-eat-you noises. She pulled out the glowing ball and poked it. Was it edible?

“Borborygmi,” said Mini.

“Bor-bor what? Who’s a pygmy?”

“Your stomach sounds…they’re called borborygmi.”

“Did you get that from the wisdom cookie?”

“Nope. Medical textbook.”

“Mini, why were you reading a medical textbook…?”

“I like to.” She shrugged. “Bodies are so cool! Did you know that more than half of us is made of water?”

“Yippee,” said Aru. “Are we there yet?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Well, you’re the one who ate the wisdom cookie.”

“Like I said,” said Mini, clearly annoyed, “it only makes you wise until the thing you’re asking wisdom for is done.”

“Technically, we’re not done. We’re still questing, or whatever, through this place. Honestly, what’s the point of making us go through all this? Don’t the gods want the world to be saved quickly? This journey is more useless than a unicorn’s horn.”

Mini looked highly affronted. “What do you mean, useless? It wouldn’t be a unicorn without a horn. That’s what the word means! Uni, for one. And then corn for, you know, horn. One-horned.”

“Yeah, but they’re supposed to be all peaceful and nice. Why would a unicorn need a horn? What’s it do with it?”

Mini turned red. “I dunno. For shooting off magic and stuff.”

“Or they use it to maul things.”

“That’s horrible, Aru! They’re unicorns. They’re perfect.”

“Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.”

She, personally, did not trust anything that had a built-in weapon and claimed not to use it. Yeah, right.

“It’s so cold all of a sudden,” said Mini.

She was right. The temperature had dropped. Well, not dropped so much as fallen off a cliff and tumbled straight down.

Aru’s long-suffering Spider-Man pajamas did little to protect her. The wind blew through the cloth, chilling her skin. “Imagine having to live in a place like this,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’d have to pick your nose all the time just so that your boogers wouldn’t freeze into icicles and stab the inside of your nose.”

“Gross!”

The air felt tight. Not that stifled, staleness of the palace. It reminded Aru of how sometimes in winter it hurt to breathe because the air had become overly sharp and thin.

“Aru, look, it’s snowing!”

Aru craned her neck and saw blue-bellied clouds drifting above them. In slow spirals, white flurries fell to the ground.

A single white flake landed on her palm. It looked like a snowflake, down to the delicate lacework of ice. But it didn’t feel like snow. Even though it was cold.

It felt like a pinch.

Beside her, Mini winced.

The snow, or whatever it was, was beginning to fall harder. Now the flakes were hitting the ground. They didn’t melt.

As Aru watched the snow, she spotted a tall tree with hundreds of tiny mirrors for bark. Something slipped behind the trunk. A figure—pale and slim, with a cloud of frosted hair. But when she blinked, she couldn’t remember what she had seen.

“Aru!” called Mini.

She didn’t respond. Not because she hadn’t heard, but because she hadn’t realized Mini was talking to her.

For a second, she had forgotten that Aru was her name.

Panicking, Aru tried to rub the snowflakes off her arm and shake them out of her hair. Something about it was making her lose track of things she should remember. It wasn’t like snow at all. It was like salt thrown on a slug. Slowly dissolving what you were.

“Is it such a bad thing, children, to forget?” asked a voice from somewhere in front of them. “If you never remember, you never grow old. Innocence keeps you ageless and blameless. People are rarely punished for deeds they cannot recall.”

Aru looked up. The snowflakes now hung suspended in the air, a thousand white droplets. A man parted the droplets as if they were a giant beaded curtain. He was beautiful.

Not movie-star handsome, which was something else; this was a distant, unearthly beauty. The way you could watch a thunderstorm brewing across the ocean and find it lovely.

The man was tall and dark-skinned, his hair a shock of silver. His eyes were like blue chips of ice. His jacket and pants were an unnaturally bright shade of white.

“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Mini asked him. “If you did, I…I can’t remember….”

“Ah, forgive me,” said the man. He laughed.

He waved his hand, and the snowy particles lifted off the girls’ skin and hair. Bits of knowledge thudded back into Aru’s head.

Only now did she remember her favorite color (green), her favorite dessert (tiramisu), and her name. How could she have forgotten those things? Aru found that very scary, because it meant she wouldn’t know when something had been stolen from her.

“My name is Shukra. I am the guardian of the Bridge of Forgetting. It is rare that I talk to living beings. You see, I do not venture often beyond my bridge.”

Aru couldn’t remember a single story about him, but that made sense, given who he was. And no wonder he never left. Imagine how rough that would be at parties. “Who are you, again?” “I’m Shukra! Don’t you remember?” “Right, right…So, who are you?”

As Shukra walked toward them, Aru noticed that there were five mirrors floating around him. One over his head, one below his feet, one on his right, and one on his left. Another floated at chest level, high enough that he would only need to tilt his chin down to see his reflection.

Was this normal for beautiful people? In Madame Bee’s salon, the whole place had been covered in reflective surfaces. Aru wondered whether mirrors just conveniently flocked to pretty people like sheep.

Behind Shukra, the land dropped off into a cliff. The snow—or whatever it was—clung to the outline of an invisible bridge. If Aru and Mini could cross that, they’d be well on their way to the place where the celestial weapons were kept.

“I’ve already forgotten my manners once,” said Shukra silkily. “I would be remiss to do so twice. Pray, what are your names, children? Your full names, please.”

Aru felt a tickle at the back of her throat. As if her name was trying to escape. She didn’t want to say it, but it was like she couldn’t help herself.

“Yamini,” said Mini.

“Arundhati,” said Aru.

It was weird to utter it aloud. She only heard her full name once a year, when teachers called roll on the first day and stumbled over the pronunciation. Aroon-dottie? Arun-dutty? Arah-hattie? Aru, she would say. Just Aru. Usually, one of her classmates would howl in the background, pretending to be a wolf calling to the night: Aroooooooo! (In first grade, Aru had tried to go along with it by leaping out of her chair and barking. She’d been sent home.)

“Lovely names. They will be beautiful ornaments for my bridge,” said Shukra, examining his fingernails.

“So can we go across?” asked Aru.

“Of course.” He smiled. He may have been handsome, but his teeth were terrifying. They were black, crooked, and filed to points. “But to those who wish to cross the Bridge of Forgetting, I always offer a choice. And I will offer the same to you. First, will you hear my tale, daughters of the gods?”

“How did you know we were the daughters of gods?” Mini asked.

“You reek of it,” said Shukra, not unkindly.

Aru discreetly sniffed her armpits. Still good. She mentally high-fived herself.

“The scent of godhood does not lurk in the pits of humans,” hissed Shukra.

“Oh.”

“The scent of godhood lies in the burdens that hover above you. Pungent and powerful stenches they are,” he said. “Each of you has a past, present, and future that was robbed from you. I, too, was robbed. Hear my tale. Then you can decide if you still wish to cross the Bridge of Forgetting.”

Two chairs made of ice swiveled out of the ground and Shukra gestured for them to sit down. Aru didn’t really want to, but the chair didn’t care. Every time she stepped away, it slid a little closer, finally tripping her so she fell into the seat. The chair was so cold it burned her skin. Beside her, Mini’s teeth chattered.

Shukra eyed himself in one of his five mirrors. “Do you know why I’m cursed to be forgotten?” he asked.

“Run-in with a bad demon?” guessed Aru.

Mini glared at her.

“If only it were that simple,” said Shukra.

Aru really wanted to kick the chair and get out of here. Shukra seemed even more dangerous than the dogs that had guarded the entrance to the Kingdom of Death. There was something too…quiet about him. As if he knew he’d already won and was just taking his time.

“I killed the one person who could stand to look at me.”

Stand to look at him? Uh, it wasn’t like he was hard on the eyes.

“My wife,” said Shukra. “She loved me, and so I killed her.”