A short story. Made up, like the others.

Mirjam had run the Molenbrug for six seasons and had never been to it.

It was one of eleven bridges on her screens in the control room at Heerhugowaard. Camera two was on a pole at the village end and looked straight across the bridge to the far bank: the road deck, the cycle path running off to the left, and at the edge of the picture a willow where the path bent away out of sight. There was no sound. When she started the barriers the red lights came on and the arms came down in silence, and when the deck went up it went up in silence, and the boat slid through under it without a sound.

Most weekday mornings, at about twenty to ten, a woman on a green bike with a crate on the front came into the bottom of camera two, rode away across the bridge, and just before the willow took her, lifted one hand off the handlebar. Somebody out of the picture, Mirjam supposed. Someone at the end house, or a man with a dog. Some days the woman got there with the lights already red, and she put a foot down and waited with everyone else, and on those days too, when the barriers went up and she rode off, the hand went up at the willow.

“It’s two willows, you know,” Ruud said once, eating an apple at the next desk. He had cycled past it on holiday. “Grown together. You can’t tell from here.”

The season ended on the fifteenth. After that the Molenbrug opened on request only, and next spring the province was moving it to another desk. On the Wednesday, her day off, Mirjam got the bike out and rode there. It took an hour and forty minutes, and she came at it from the far side, along the cycle path, round the bend.

There were two willows. Two trunks leaning together, close enough at the top that the branches had mixed.

She stopped at the barrier with the bridge in front of her and the village on the other side. On the barrier post was a small blue board: Deze brug wordt op afstand bediend, this bridge is operated remotely, and a phone number. Hers, more or less. She found the pole at the far end and the camera on it. It was smaller than she had thought, and grey, with a streak down one side where birds had sat on it. She knew exactly what it could see: the deck, this bank, the path, her. She was in the picture now, near the top, a little short of where the woman always left it.

Ruud had her desk on Wednesdays.

A yacht was coming up the canal with its mast up, slowly, and Mirjam watched it the way she would have watched it on camera three, judging when. The red lights came on about when she would have put them on.

Then the bell.

She had never heard the bell. It rang the whole time the arms were coming down and stopped the moment they stopped, and in the quiet after it she heard the deck start to lift, a deep rising hum, and some ducks complaining, and the yacht’s engine ticking over. Across the water, on the village side, the woman on the green bike had come up just too late and put her foot down at the line. She waited. She looked at her phone, then didn’t.

The yacht went through. A man on its deck waved at no one in particular. The deck came down, and the bell rang again while the arms went up, and stopped.

The woman came across. She rode towards Mirjam and past her, not looking, and Mirjam turned to watch her go round the bend by the willows, where there was nobody at all. Just before the trees the hand came up. Not a wave to anyone ahead. Up and back over her shoulder, without turning her head, the way you thank a driver who has let you out.

It was for the bridge. For whoever had put the lights on and taken them off again, whoever was watching from Heerhugowaard. Most mornings for six seasons, that had been Mirjam.

She looked back across the bridge at the pole.

On a screen in Heerhugowaard she was a small grey shape at the top of camera two, and Ruud would be logging the yacht. She rode across to the village end anyway, turned round by the end house, and came back over the bridge the woman’s way, slowly, along the middle of the path. Just before the willows she lifted her hand up and back over her shoulder, to whoever was on.