Page 54 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. Iv #8

T Mary lewis Big Air
even feel her fingers. She plunges them into her coat pockets. No good, and she thrusts them under her clothing against her bare, shocked belly. She peers over the same edge now with a twinge of fear.
hrough scrubby juniper to the base of a rocky
dolomite wall, a dark figure climbs the steep snowy trail. The new snow makes each step
its own event. Nothing else moves through the woods except now and then a nuthatch, a crow lacing the hills with flight. In this region the land is rugged, carved by streams running their same course as before the last ice age. It is late after- noon, and the sun is gold striking the rocks.
Sensation begins to return, but painfully, and she almost wishes for her white insensible fingers back. Feeling around in those pockets, she finds the stone. Smooth on one end, jagged on the other and a little crumbly – the pebble Gabe had picked up along the shore of Bass Lake last summer and given to her, knowing she liked rocks with many layers. Her fingernail breaks off little pieces. One flake pierces the quick of her fingernail, and everything in her gathers around that point as though she can funnel into herself there.
The person must be exercising because there is no pause. Perhaps this human has been at a desk all day, muscles longing to move. At the base of the cliff the figure looks up and an eagle flying overhead would see wisps of pale hair escaping from beneath a hat, the smooth line from cheek to delicate jaw, suggesting a woman. Later, circling back from the river, the eagle might catch sight of the figure closer to the sky now, at the top of that cliff wall, on a spur of rock with so little soil in its cracks not even the most straggly juniper could hold on by the tips of its roots.
On the streets below, not visible from where she sits, a sporty jeep, maybe a Cherokee, crawls along a snow-streaked blacktop, and turns into a driveway, disappears inside a detached ga- rage next to a white house that was once the farmhouse for the Smedsrud farm subdivided years ago. Perhaps from her spot up there she recognizes the chortle of the muffler that needs fixing, and knows Gabe is home from work. He’d see that she was out, but by the purse in the entryway know that she’d first come home from high school where she taught Earth Science.
She stands near the edge rounded now with snow, and closes her eyes to the sun’s final blaze in the western sky. Her brow is moist from the climb and her cheeks are as red as the sun caught in tree branches on the far ridge. Something rustles in the brush behind her. A deer grazing in the scruffy woods lifts its head to watch her. The woman turns and sees the doe there, and laughs as if to say, “Oh, it’s only you.”
Her boots would be gone. Nothing unusual, she often went out for a walk after work. Their boys would be home much later, after basketball and wrestling.
The woman steps to the very edge of the cliff, leans precariously forward as if to tempt the air. For one long moment, she rides the crest of an in- visible wave, before falling backwards, grasping at the snow as if now to save herself from the big air.
On the kitchen counter a package in butcher paper. Gabe presses it. Still hard, and he shakes
After a time she sits up. She draws off her mittens, to jam fistfuls of snow into her eye sockets, hop- ing for it to melt down her hot ruddy cheeks and darken her pink scarf to a deep red. It stays solid against the orbs of her eyeballs, and now she can’t
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