Page 68 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. Iv #8

Big Air (continued from page 48 )
surprising herself, takes it out to show him. He touches her hand. “So cold.” Then from her palm, picks up the pebble. “That little stone I picked up in Bass Lake? Didn’t know you’d kept it.”
surprise.
“Your shoes are full of snow.”
As they shuffle along through the deep snow, all he sees of their feet is the little storms of white sifting ahead with each footstep. It is easier to talk side by side – they’d always been best when they were on their way somewhere. In the dark he can’t tell her expression, maybe not that hurt look that she had saved just for him. As when he’d lost his temper that morning and called her a stubborn bitch. A name he’d never called her in all their years of marriage. And it frightened him that such a mundane act of putting away a coat and boots to where, finally, rightfully, they belonged, could make him lose his temper in a way he never had before. Maybe because he’d only ever seen her hang up the coats of guests. Acquaintances.
Randal starts digging in the depression Elena had made sitting in the snow, so close to the edge, she grabs his collar. Maybe Gabe wouldn’t see how close. She starts down the trail and the two boys follow.
Even against the white of the snow, it is hard to make out the moving figures in the receding dusk. They skid now and then on their descent, grab tree branches to steady themselves. At the bot- tom of the hill where the trail joins Spruce Lane, they appear under a street lamp. It is the last road in town, in a sloping neighborhood with curvy streets laid out to follow the contour of the old pasture. The dog sniffs at the base of every tree, and now the man walks at the woman’s side, her shape cast in the snow at the edge of the cliff etched into his brain. Had she been thinking about sliding off? Then springing up and scolding Ran- dal for nearly doing the same? Yes he’d blown up at her, but how could it lead to this? What the hell was he going to do about it? Walk some tightrope like any mistake would hurl them both into the abyss?
They hadn’t said the D word yet, but he was certainly thinking about it. Seems she was thinking of a different D word and it scared him right down to the soles of his frozen run- ning shoes. But this calm after what she almost might have done, up on that cliff...he needs to do something to match the fear in his belly so he grasps her shoulders, but only gives them a good solid jerk.
He reaches his arm around her, for stability, his and hers. She doesn’t pull away. That gives him hope. And the stone, she’d kept it all this time right in her pocket. When he found it on the beach he had washed it off to bring out the stripes of white and gray. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed, really more of a little catch in her breath that reminded him
She pushes him away. She makes snowballs to throw for Randal. It is cruel play, Randal trying so hard to find the snowballs in the sea of snow. The man comes up behind her and grabs her around the waist, in what could be a gesture
of the first time he saw her, nearly two decades ago. Back then she’d sat down next to him in the only empty seat on a crowded downtown bus, looking a little off balance because of her long hair draped across one shoulder. A book slipped out of her hands to the floor. He’d picked it up and at the moment he handed it to her the bus lurched. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed, with that same small element of
of young lovers about to tumble into the snow, he swirling her around, she straining playfully against him. But the sounds are different. In- stead of squeals of delight, there is the noise of struggle in the darkness, and the disturbance of new-fallen snow, so that later a passerby might think children had been there. But as she is struggling against him – no snowman, no angels.
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Gabe brushes a bare hand across his moist cheek, tastes the salt on his fingers, and then his chest starts heaving all by itself. Well let it, he could cry in front of his own wife, couldn’t he?
He releases her and they fall apart. She throws another snowball for Randal who returns cir- cling, to become again a planet to their system, a barking comet on a long elliptical orbit.