My mother drives me over the Bay Bridge to her new home, in north Oakland or south Berkeley. The bridge is over land, though! Where San Francisco Bay once stretched is now just sand as far as the eye can see. Though that isn't far: it's sunny, but a low tule fog hugs the ground.

At the bridge entrance, a strange man stares at coins on the sand. Is he the tollman? He tells us "If you see a girl around here, these are hers."

I do find the girl. But she's dead! Decapitated. Yet bloodless. Bloodless as a doll!

A detective comes and looks for clues. An odd guy for a cop: he tells me "Before turning to police work, I built this bridge."

Once the detective's been over the scene, the old tollman arranges her body. He lines her in different ways for quite a while--her exact orientation seems to matter to him, like she's an antenna, not a corpse.

At last, by chance, he sticks her head back on her neck.

Her eyes flutter. She blinks and looks at us in surprise. She says: "How long was I asleep?"

And that's all, folks. No tunnel of light, no divine messages... Shit, I wanted a great afterlife story!

Still, I talk with her a while. I give her the message inherent in the coins for her: "Call your parents." Again, it seems so banal, after the miracle.

She's attractive, yet I make no effort to become friends or lovers. Neither does she. In fact she's strangely emotionless, and I respond in kind. I leave... go upstairs.

Where I find clues proving who her murderer was--the Inspector in charge of investigating her case!

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Bridge = no more ferry over the river of forgetting to the Land of the Dead. Now there's a highway bridge! Still a toll, though.
• Death, coins = the Greeks began the custom of putting pennies on the eyes of the dead to pay the toll over the river.
• three books inspired bits of this:
  1. Coins, "change" = the Pennies of Experience in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. By pennies she means small changes, small flashes of insight.
  2. Decapitated woman revives, but is emotionless at first = echoes a scene in a Sherri Tepper novel--"Sideshow", maybe? The victim did regain her emotions, by consciously choosing to resurrect them too, not just reason.
  3. The detective committed the murder = Gene Wolfe's classic story The Fifth Head of Cerberus. A family of clones wastes its energy in obsessive introspection and intrigue... Have I gotten like them?
• WARNING! Trying to figure out my problem has BECOME a problem! More self-analysis won't help as much as just random messing around... and time.

How's that for a plan?

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