"Stu" by Tim Craig

What I should have said to him that night on the bridge is Don’t let go, but what I actually said is Do it and whether he would have done it anyway — full, as he was, of being seventeen and a crate of Special Red — went down into the black water with him. And for weeks the adults wept, and the teams of frogmen combed the silt as far the estuary where the river spools into the flat Atlantic, but no trace of Stu would ever reward their efforts.

We hung around, the rest of us, though we avoided the bridge and the river and talking about him. We sat on the wall of the race track; we skulked in the churchyard and threw stones at the cans we balanced on gravestones.

And for all our strut and disbelief, not one of us back then would have predicted Stu would show up again all of thirty years later, tangle-haired and bearded, having lost his memory in an Ashram in Rishikesh.

And of course he didn’t.

But now, on those occasions late at night when his sister – my wife – stares into her glass, and clinks the ice around, and asks me what I think really happened to him, I make up stories like that for her, and for me, and this is one of them.

Tim Craig lives in London. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his small stories have appeared three times in the Best Microfiction anthology and in many literary journals in the US and UK. His debut collection, ‘Now You See Him,’ was published in 2022 by Ad Hoc Fiction.