the cyan bridge
Panicked, Clarke called, “Isabel! Where are you?” He raced up the creaking wooden steps of their Queen Anne home, an exuberant style of Victorian architecture, and an early 20th century gem lovingly maintained in St. Louis’s Lafayette Square.
Javier, intercepted Clarke at the top of the stairs. “I think I have an idea.” He said. Javier led Clarke down the second floor’s hallway. “Our daughter’s been missing for hours, Javier, I’m calling the police…” Clarke pulled his mobile from his pocket.
Javier gripped Clarke’s arm, a firm clasp was accentuated by confidence effusing maple brown eyes. “Clarke, let’s just take a look.” Javier pointed up to the attic’s ceiling-mounted entry panel. He reached up, tugged the latch, and revealed a wooden ladder, which gracefully cascaded down to the floor. Together, they climbed into the attic.
“Isabel!” Clarke called. He took the lead while ducking under wooden braces that supported the slanted roof. They carefully threaded through the space, mindful of snap traps set to capture rodents. The asymmetry of the home’s exterior design features made for a Byzantine labyrinth of wooden truss-work that only complicated navigation.
Clarke and Javier heard a rustling motion near the rearmost gable of the home. They swiftly followed the sounds. Next clue—they encountered a shower curtain rod on the floor. It had an uncurled wire coat hanger strapped to the side with the hook protruding at one end to serve as a makeshift extension to grasp the attic’s entry latch.
Finally, they found a fortress built out of cardboard boxes, which were lavished with crayon forged ornamentation. Removing one of the boxes, Javier found Isabel. She was caught in mid-play—building structures out of Lumber Linx, a toy made popular over a century ago, that had been untouched in this attic for generations.
“Isabel, what are you doing?” Clarke scolded. “We’ve been searching for you for hours.”
Isabel looked to her fathers, guiltless. She shrugged, “Playing.” She re-emerged into her own world, continuing to add-on to the grand palace that was materializing in her mind.
Besides the toy boxes, Javier unveiled a box filled with hand-crafted gauze masks; some even featured a cigarette-sized slit in the area placed over the mouth.
At closer inspection of the boxes, Javier found a crayon crafted signature that read ‘Margaret Davis, 1918 ’. Margaret’s signature was circled in cyan crayon and linked by a curved line to another circled name that read ‘Isabel Garcia, 2020 ’. Cyan was Isabel’s favorite color.
Two children were connected by a story in rhyme—bridged by the shared experience of quarantine, and separated by only a century.
-m
May 4, 2020