A woman stood on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The woman’s hands were tied behind her, her wrists tightly bound with a cord. A noose encircled her neck and was attached to a timber near her left foot. A series of loose boards laid across the timbers of the bridge served as a platform for her and her executioners. 

Behind her, the young captain in his blue uniform stood rigidly and stared at the back of her head. A strand of her honey-colored hair had escaped the noose and lifted in the breeze while the two privates and the sergeant finished the preparations. The captain noted the shakiness of the young privates’ hands.

On either end of the bridge, a union soldier stood sentry, facing away from the center of the bridge. On the North side of the bridge, the federals had built a small log fortification with gun loops and the brass barrel of a cannon protruding. In front of this stockade, further down the grassy slope, a single company of soldiers stood at attention in two parallel lines. Their lieutenant stood to the right of the formation with his sword tip in the dirt. 

When everything was secured, the sergeant stepped onto the plank, closely facing his captain, and saluted. “Ready, sir.”

The captain returned his salute and stepped backward off of the plank, then took two sideways steps. That left the weight of the sergeant on one end of the plank and on the other, extending two feet beyond the edge of the bridge, the weight of Penelope Farquhar. 

She stood as bravely as anyone could have, though her heart was hammering. While she was aware of the preparations behind her, she was trying to control her breathing by focusing her thoughts on her family back home. How would they hear of this? Would they be punished? She wanted them to be her last thoughts but it was the face and voice and body of Cyrus that was pushing his way into her final thoughts. “We’ll be together momentarily,” she said to the vision. “Let me think of the living.”

“May God save your soul,” said the Captain, and raised his gloved hand. Immediately the sergeant stepped away from his end of the plank and Penelope Farquhar plunged toward the steam.

Instantly, her perception widened. She felt her skirts lifted around her thighs and she could hear them whoosh in the wind. The sun slid along a thousand ripples in the current. The leaves on the trees rubbed against each other. The bridge creaked as the privates leaned over the edge to watch. 

Then everything was white. Every nerve in her body fired its full charge. It seemed her head would explode…and then she passed out.

She came to in the cold water. Though her mouth was barely open, she could feel cold water on her tongue. Her feet touched the bottom of the dark river and she looked up at the cloudy light of the sun above the surface. As if her thoughts could not keep pace with her senses, she realized that the rope had broken. That she had plunged straight down into the cold spring flood of Owl Creek. Her wrists burned as she jerked her right hand free of the cords that had bound them and began to claw at the rope around her neck.

Just as her head broke the surface of the water, she pulled the noose from her throat and inhaled a mixture of clean spring air and black creek water. She sputtered and gasped and flailed her arms madly. She had surfaced facing away from the bridge but now slowly spun around as she coughed and gasped. The privates on the bridge, unarmed, pointed frantically in her direction. The captain stepped to the edge of the bridge and drew his pistol down on her, but the shot flew wide to her right. The sentry on the camp-end of the bridge raised his rifle. She could see his eye squinting, then a cloud of smoke. But his shot was also wide. 

Behind the sentry, the lieutenant was shouting at the company and she saw them raise their rifles in unison and swivel in her direction. Although she was still choking, she dove as deeply as she could while the bullets, flattened by the impact with the water, fluttered past her.

She came up for air again, noting how much further she already was from the bridge and the little blue soldiers furiously reloading their guns. Still struggling to expel the water from her lungs, she began to swim furiously in the swift current. In seconds, she heard the rapid crackling of another volley. She heard the bullets fffwwwippping past her, but she swam on towards the sweeping bend of the river, unharmed.

( . )

She had come to the bridge to burn it. Rumor had it that a large snarl of dried driftwood lay against the bridge pile. Before the sun had risen, she walked silently up the road with a bag that contained a large bundle of rags, a bottle of lamp oil, and her dead husband's match safe. In her other hand, she carried the small ax she used for chickens. Her plan was to swing wide of the outpost on the road by skirting through the woods, then, as she approached the bridge, to sneak up to the sentry. If she could get around him unseen, so much the better. She had the ax in case the only way to the bridgehead was through him.

It had taken more than a day for her to hear that Cyrus was dead. News of the ambush had spread immediately–who knew that the federal approach had drawn so close, so quick? But confirmation that Cyrus’s regiment had been involved took hours longer to reach her. A man had walked out from the town to tell her that every man in Cyrus’s company had been killed or captured when they marched out of the forest and stumbled into a much larger force of Yankees already arrayed on either side of the road.

“He may be alive, Miss Penny,” he offered. “They sayin’ half the boys was caught, not killed.”

But she didn’t believe it. At least not the part about hope.

When she heard a day later that the Yankees were rebuilding the Owl Creek bridge just thirty miles away, she shooed away the neighbors who had come out to the place to help her mourn. She had run this little farm on her own for two years already, she said. She could do what needed to be done.

When she stepped from the trees onto the road after circumventing the outpost, she was spotted immediately by a group of soldiers on their way to relieve the outpost. That ax barely slowed them down.

( . )( . )

The soldiers had begun to run along the low bluff above the river. Every once in a while, one of them would stop to reload and fire, but their shots came nowhere close to her. As she swept around the long bend of the river, she turned and could make out three of them, scrambling down the bluff. Then they disappeared behind the bend.

She was now alone on the river and flexed her toes and fingers. Her blood raced into her limbs. Every cell of her body was alive: she could feel the current on each clear hair of her arms, smell the water and the forest floor and the pines. She could pick out the voices of individual birds as she passed beneath the choir loft.

The river widened and began to roll up into rapids. She put her feet out in front of her and immediately her heels thudded against a large dark stone. They held and the current pushed her to her feet so that she could stand again. Slowly, carefully (and not without falling a few times) she made her way to shore where she stood looking upstream and trembling with delicious cold. Light dripped from the highest leaves above the black river and pooled on the mossy banks and the forest floor. 

She wondered how she had gotten here. She shivered in the wet clothes plastered against her and began to strip them off. 

A gasp behind her caused her to spin around. A man’s uniform was draped on the branches and there on the lip of the little bank a man stood in the nude. It was her Cyrus. His mouth hung open in astonishment. Then he was leaping down the bank onto the stony shore. As they embraced, even beneath the joyous noise of their shouting, she felt a sharp jolt of pleasure when her nipples pressed into his chest hair. They wept, and danced, and shook on the cool mossy stones of the streambed. 

Elbowing its way through the joy and confusion, a great lust began to take its stations. Her hands, still cold from the water, reached down for his balls. They were heavy and warm. His mouth moved from hers to her throat, into the crease between her breasts.

Now they weren’t in the forest at all. They were in a cabin on the quarter section of land her father had given them. Tomorrow was their first anniversary and she was glad that they had restuffed the mattress with the sweetest smelling grasses they could find yesterday. It was fresh and lush and soft as he lowered her onto it. Propped on his hands, she felt his long hair brushing her breasts as his tongue trailed down to her nipple. He sucked it lightly, just letting his teeth graze it before his tongue went back to work. She could feel his cock, growing heavy, as it pressed onto her thigh and knee. Then he was kneeling over her shins and his tongue was traveling again. It traced along the bottom of her left, then her right breast, then stepped across her ribs and trailed down her soft belly. 

When his tongue passed her navel, he slowed. She felt the tip of his nose as it skimmed her bush. Then he was pressing kisses on her inner thighs. She felt that tongue making lazy swirls higher up the inside of her thighs. His hot breath swept across her labia as he moved to kiss the other thigh. And then, having changed his mind, his tongue was reaching out, delicately, to lightly brush along the inner folds of her labia. Where the lips parted a little below, he pressed his tongue more forcefully and reversed direction. Passing over the tiny bud of her clit, he pressed his tongue even harder against it and pulled his lips around it, sucking for just a second.

She grabbed a fistful of hair on the top of his head and arched her hips, grinding his face into her pussy. She could feel his tongue straining to get as deep into her as possible. Then she was dragging his face like a plow toward her clit. He slipped his finger into her bucking pussy as he sucked her into his mouth and danced his tongue against her clit. His tongue and finger splashed over and into her, liquid ripples of pleasure spreading out beyond her belly.

She was so close to orgasm. She felt another finger brush the bottom of her opening just before he plunged it in to press against her g-spot. She clenched her fists tight as her whole body rolled to the lip of the pitcher, about to be poured into an orgasm.

There was a lightning thud at the back of her head. Cyrus’s hair and his bare ass (a little arched as he dug his face into her), her wide-spread knees, their bed and their bedroom and the window…all of it blazed into white light that scattered into darkness.

Penelope Farquhar swung back and forth beneath the bridge. The privates, who after all were very young, turned away when they saw her bound hands ball into fists and fall open.