Content Disclosure: Mild Violence, Supernatural Themes
The river had a proper name at one point, but that name moved on, perhaps over the Ferry toward the supposedly greener pastures of its opposite banks, just like everyone else in this damned unreal city. Now we—or maybe just I—call it the Stinks. Because the river does stink something horrendous, like a skunk soaked in week-old cook oil, strung up on a laundry line between the festering skinbags of a whole family of sewer rats. Enough to suffocate the few souls still here, though I consider myself well past the point of minding; on an impossibly warm morning like this, despite the slow-moving, sludgy-watered concoction, I can still sit on the shore and smoke.
Paps was the one who taught me to say Stinks, and from my current vantage point—squatting on a chewed-up sofa twenty skips from where the river begs the litter-hoarding shore for mercy—I have a perfect view of the place I last laid eyes on him. The name is suppose to be a pun, an allusion, Paps reminded me over brews the morning before he moved on, as if I had any idea what it alluded to. And then he gathered up the rest of his wits for the Ferry crossing.
Tiny, the Ferry was, and still is, a whining baby of a boat, definitely not stout enough for both its passenger and its passenger’s baggaged hopes concerning their destination, but once that fee gets plunked into that little slot on the dock, Paps said as he inserted his own golden token, the gears of the world turn, and the Ferry chugs along across the Stinks with enough rusty fortitude to—
How? I blubbered. I had asked this many times before, only to receive vague answers regarding our ancestral ingenuity and all that. I’d be the last one left of a long lineage of Ferry drivers. Somehow, somewhen, we figured to automatize the thing, meaning we could stay put at the pawnshop uphill and run our real business, trading for tokens. Will it ever stop working?
Paps stepped off the dock, onto the boat. As long as you’re here, no, he said. You cannot abandon your post.
And then I watched him take his turn to move on, to disappear into the shadowy haze across the river.
So far, Paps and his last words stand strong. Often, I take a break from the shop to eye the Ferry. It never fails to function. Today, just as I’m sitting there, adding cigarette ash to the gritty riverbank, beginning to recall what Paps’s face looked like, I hear the horn moan. About a hard stone’s throw away from me the boat detaches from its berth, its crusted paint peeling under, braving the brown-black current. The Ferry will deposit its passenger—the one I served earlier this morning who pawned a whole set of fine dinnerware—safely on the Other Side, and then it will come back
