When the Bridge Fell
The lights flickered first—
just a blink,
like the building held its breath.
We thought maybe a surge,
summer storm,
just another twitch in the current of death.
Then the pager cracked.
Sharp voices,
frantic,
codes and numbers too fast to hold.
Something was wrong.
Something was breaking
right there, in the city we thought we knew cold.
“Bridge down. 35W. Full collapse.”
Time split like concrete under weight.
And then it came—
the rush,
the flood,
of sirens and stretchers and fate.
The doors blew open—
not wind,
but people.
Dripping river,
spitting blood,
torn limbs and thousand-yard stares.
The air turned thick with copper and cries.
Scrubs soaked in sweat before the first chart was read.
A child clutched to a chest that wouldn’t rise.
A woman screaming names of the already dead.
No protocol could hold the surge.
No checklist stood a chance.
We were bodies in motion,
lungs on fire,
hearts beating past the edge of chance.
I remember one man—
soaked, shivering, silent—
but his eyes had seen it all.
Steel snap.
Cars fold.
The river rise to swallow the fall.
I held pressure on wounds
with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
And prayed silently between each task—
not for a miracle,
but just for a break in the breaking.
And through it all—
I was alone.
No one waiting when I came home.
My wife, half a world away,
in the desert heat of Iraq,
dodging her own collapse
with every breath she didn’t say.
No one to hold me that night
when the screams still echoed in my head.
No voice down the hallway,
just silence,
and sheets gone cold
on one side of the bed.
I wanted to tell her—
about the blood, the eyes, the flood—
but I swallowed it whole,
knowing she had her own ghosts
to carry through sand and gun smoke.
And yet, somehow,
we stood.
Bent but unbroken.
Moved by some bond that needed no spoken word.
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, chaplains—
all of us there
as the grief roared and blurred.
Later, the lights steadied.
The night grew quiet,
but no one really slept.
We carried it home
in our clothes,
in our skin,
in the secrets we wept.
And even now,
years gone past,
when the power blinks or sirens scream,
I’m back there—
in that wave of chaos
that ended one city’s dream—
and I’m still alone,
even when she’s home,
in the place where I never told her everything I’d seen.
© 2025 Shawn Oen. All rights reserved