Blast | August 28, 2025

“Jumper Girl” is the 2025 Perkoff Prize runner-up in nonfiction. In this haunting essay, Bonnie Darves recalls her relationship with a persona who captured her imagination and stayed with her throughout her life—as a grief, a burden, and a guide.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

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JUMPER GIRL

In the 1970s, when I was twenty and living in San Francisco in an apartment that overlooked Noe Valley out the back and a sliver of distant bay in the front, I encountered a newspaper article that altered my life. It wasn’t much more than a photo and caption—four inches deep across a single column of a newspaper I was leafing through while loitering at a bodega waiting for the 24 Divisadero bus.

In the image, a pair of pewter-hued flat shoes, their leather scuffed and cracked, sat side by side at the very edge of the roof of a tall building in Texas from which, the day before, a young woman had jumped to her death. What struck me about the photo, besides its naked tragedy, was how the shoes’ toes turned up slightly, as if their wearer had walked around on tiptoe.

I purchased the newspaper, walked outside, and sat on a ledge a few doors down. And wept. When I had collected myself, I walked the mile to my apartment, clutching the newspaper to my chest as if it were a precious object someone was trying to wrest from me.

Thus began my relationship with the Jumper Girl, whose name I would never know, whose face I would never see, but whose short life would become interwoven with my own. In the months that followed, I periodically took the picture, which I’d clipped and pasted onto a piece of cardboard, out of my top dresser drawer. I sat and held it in my lap, looking down at it just once before putting it back.

Then I would weep, for everything—anything—that should or might have happened in the days or weeks before her death to alter her course but didn’t. It was as if, in keeping her close, I was trying to be the last person to hold her. More than that, I think I was trying to understand how and why, in those final moments of her life, she chose to remove her shoes and place them just so. What state of mind permitted that calculated yet gentle act?

***

At the time, I did not examine my disproportionate response to the photo or to the Jumper Girl. The “sessions” would just come on and I was powerless to interrupt the grief wave that engulfed me. Nor did I think about her parents or her siblings or her friends—a fact that is unconscionable to me now. Thinking about them came much later, long after she had lodged herself as my small, constant burden, as the companion she would become.

Unwittingly, I embroidered her persona and she began to take form. My Jumper Girl was a slight figure of medium height with large gray eyes and pale skin. Her thin blond hair, untended, fell just to her shoulders in erratic ringlets. Waiflike, she wore a slightly shabby mid-calf-length dress in some pale hue then in vogue, a dusty lavender or soft salmon, in lightweight cotton with a faint floral pattern. It was hot in Texas, my thought process must have gone, and if she did not dress for her death, perhaps she did at least dress for the weather that day in early June.

Her name was always something feminine, three syllables and slightly old-fashioned—Abigail, Louisa, Madeline.

It occurs to me now that I “befriended” Jumper Girl by way of making a bargain: I would keep her and care for her and prop up her memory if she would promise to haunt me less. And so it happened—over time, her destabilizing effect on my psyche diminished somewhat.

I lost the photo during one of my many moves about the city—I lived in five apartments in as many years. Yet she remained present, and it took no effort to conjure her. She arrived unbidden sometimes, when I was nosed between textbook pages or serving a Johnny Walker on the rocks to a blustering businessman at the Financial District watering hole where I worked.

She had an uncanny knack for showing up and ejecting me from even a pleasurable activity on a perfect day: when a salt-sharp breeze blew in off the bay and I had seconds before thought that I was in the most beautiful place on the planet at the most interesting time in history.

Her shoes, those saddening shoes, were never far from my mind. My fantasies ran to those, too, to what happened to them. I imagined the photographer who captured the scene, his finger trembling as he pressed the shutter button, his hands unsteady as he tucked the camera back in its case. I imagined the pair of law enforcement officers investigating the incident walking toward the roof’s edge. How did they retrieve the shoes, I wondered? Did one of them, belly-sliding his way across the warm, wavy tar, pluck them with a finger or a beat stick? Did he cry?

***

I kept Jumper Girl, as I’d promised, yet the prospect of deeply examining my motive for doing so disturbed me. Was it detached grief? Was it guilt for living on beyond her? Was it some outsized extrapolation from my fear of heights? Mere garden-variety obsession?

I should have chastised myself for remaining mired in a negative cycle and sought help as a way of moving on. But I didn’t. I feared that I’d be deemed unhinged, which I was but wouldn’t know until years later when a depression slithered into my veins, threaded its way to my brain and lodged there. Mostly, I felt that it would be disloyal to let her go—that if I did not continue to mourn her, no one would.

Later, as sadnesses stacked up in my life the way they do in any life, in any mind that permits a visceral response to events that move us deeply, I came to diagnose my affliction as grief once removed. As a form of empathy that involves a displacement or transference because the object of the empathy is not within reach. And I came to embrace it as an aspect of myself that didn’t need to be fixed.

***

It has been more than forty years since I began my relationship with Jumper Girl and I am less sad about her now than I once was. She comes to mind infrequently but remains a feature of my life in the way that a childhood memory or sensory association becomes inextricable from our notion of self.

She appears ephemerally when I read a life-too-short story, and she sometimes shows up when I am sad for reasons unrelated to tragedy. She stays awhile, always, when I am mired in a manifestation of collective grief.

In 1987, I lived again briefly in San Francisco while in the clutches of a deepening depression. As I staggered around the city on those blunt-bright October days, Jumper Girl followed patiently behind, a breeze tossing her tendrils while all around us men were dying young and thin and purple-pocked in darkened rooms.

A decade later, my twelve-year-old niece died of a rare cancer. During her final months when we, her far-flung family, startled every time the phone rang, Jumper Girl sat beside me, her hands folded in her lap while I uttered the clipped moans I later came to know as anticipatory grief.

In September 2001, on the day after the towers fell, I left my daughter at college in Santa Cruz. After we parted, I sat squinting and sobbing over the steering wheel while she walked away along a redwood-bounded path to where a makeshift memorial had been assembled and distant figures hunched over hundreds of tiny votives they were lighting against the gathering dusk.

As I drove northward through the night toward Oregon on the uncannily quiet interstate, my Jumper Girl sat above me, perched on the car’s hood and pointing toward the sky bright with stars as if to say, “Look, just look.”

***

Bonnie Darves is a Florida-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Most mornings find her plying the waters of her beloved Gulf of Mexico, where her long swims reliably deliver a creative boost and soothe whatever ails her soul.