SOLOMON'S BRIDGE {Part I}

WATERTOWN *6*

EDIMA

Uhh, yeah, this bead cluster and flower fest is my room. but I can't describe it now, I'm sort of, dashing out the door. I see Jessica.

I wave; it's clipped, short and ignored, as usual. On this bright and early Thursday morning, I'm thinking about other things too serious to be bothered by it, things like how to find the Custodian. I've been looking for this woman for ten years. I know that she's here in this city. I'm going to find her, I'm going to keep looking for her, until I do. It's... imperative.

"Hey, Lady Eddie, what's up?" The guy in room 2 steps out.

"I'm good, Byron!"

He folds his hands at the elbows, "Going out-?"

I nod my head, yup, "In a rush, too!"

"Oh-ok, listen, I'm going offshore this afternoon, so, you recall The Papa talking about the back fence? Okay, so everyone is contributing towards it. The boy will fix it for us, next weekend, just, to give you a heads up, yeah?"

I lock my door and wriggle into my long jacket, "Okay! That's great! Sure!"

He laughs like he finds me very amusing. His apartment door is opposite mine and, maybe he's seen me singing to the chickens at the back, in my granny nightgown at six in the morning. You know what's funny? The chickens are not even mine! They're for Ette Moses, my eighty five year old Jack of all trades, who has coined for himself, an imperial title in, "The Papa."

I power walk past Byron. I think he's the most enigmatic of all my neighbours. He is super friendly without being a friend. I've noticed women trying to get his attention, whenever he buys stuff in my shop. But I've never seen a lady coming to knock on his door. And he's been a tenant here, my tenant here, for three years now...

Here. Where I live, now. It's a solid three floors of upscale architecture, the only sublet brownstone block of flats on this boulevard, and it's called Diamond Apartments. I've owned it for five years, ever since I decided to turn my late parents house into a big amusement park for kids, with a modern lecture hall annexed to it, for my HRBC Ministry. You see, where I live now, is a spanking new city, it's Canaan city. Where my late parents house is, the old town, is WaterTown, and a fairytale kind of bridge runs between, connecting the one to the other.

I'm on my way to pick a fight with a gorilla of a man twice my size. He owns the only radio station in the city; BM, or Basement Fm. This man also owns the city's sleeziest rag tag tabloid; The Parrot. He's wealthy, influential, arrogant and a total bin bag. He called me... a religious nutcase on the air waves, and Canaan City's resident Prophetess of Doom in his gossip magazine. There are days when I imagine the various ways I can trim him down to size (shaking my head,) but I promised The Most High no more punching bone roughhouse; this little La Reine des Reines is all gentled up now. So yeah! I got a story, but how do I tell this story? Should I begin with, once upon a time?

"Once upon a time, there was a really powerful voodoo guy a.k.a juju high priest a.k.a wickedest wizard, who built this awesome bridge from part illusion and part reality, whose devotees had to sacrifice their lives, at an appointed time, before the crack of dawn on said bridge, and become avatars to a terrible principality, of which devotees I am ashamed to claim kinship to the most recent...no matter how unwittingly he fell into this particular mishap; he was, unfortunately, my father... So my part in this story is very simply summed up in a straight line of other people's connecting dots. Wickedest wizard begins the line to connect to the bridge, which is the first dot, then daddy avatar continues the line to connect to the second dot, which is me, the bridge baby..."