Big Tea Table Bridge — William Williamson

To the uninitiated, Big Tea Table Bridge is just one of the many bridges visitors cross over as they drive down the necklace of islands that make up the Florida Keys. But Big Tea Table Bridge has a storied, unspoken history in its past. To the left, out in the Atlantic, sits Indian Key that has a renegade, wreckers past of men salvaging the goods from ships wrecked on the reefs, dating back to the early eighteen hundreds until Indians slaughtered the inhabitants on the island one night and burned their settlement town down.

To the right, in the Florida Bay is Lignum Vitae Key, a three hundred acre island with the highest elevation in the Keys, rumored to have buried pirate treasure and ghosts that still roam the island.

One hot summer evening on his sixteenth birthday, native Conch, Henry Roberts comes home to find his mother on the couch in a compromising situation with a stranger. In anger and betrayal, Henry runs off to fish Big Tea Table Bridge at night where he hooks up with two unsavory characters who subsist day to day in the present much like the wreckers and pirates from the past.

Big Tea Table Bridge is more than a fish story about catching or losing the big one. It's about losing adolescent innocence.