The thin air makes you dizzy. Somewhere among the gray splotches in the distance lies the small Mexican villa that’s served as your temporary home. You squint, trying to pick it out, but the maze of cacti and sand dunes hides it away too well. The sky extends overhead like a solid blue canopy of glass, unblemished until it touches the bright orange hills in the distance. You saw a painting like this once and said the colors seemed too bright and fake. Now you’re standing in that painting, on the edge of a cliff side and ready to jump.
“What am I doing here?” you mutter. You’re afraid of heights; you have been ever since you were twelve and broke your arm falling out of your tree house in the backyard.
You look to your right and see her, that twenty-something woman with tangled hair and a sun-scorched face. As usual, she didn’t wear her sun block. She smiles at you and points toward the empty air beyond the cliff’s edge. Somehow, she got you up here. She always finds a way.
“Are you ready?”
***
You’re eight years old and you lack an imagination for danger. You try for days to swing over the top bar because that’s the most frightening thing you can think of. Of course, you always come just short of actually doing it, and you tell all of your friends that today would have been the day if it wasn’t for those nagging teachers watching you at recess. The other kids follow suit, loudly protesting the authorities while staying silently thankful for their watchful eyes.
One girl is different, though. The teachers keep a careful eye on her, using words like “rabble rouser” and “daredevil.” One day she manages to sneak away from their gaze. She gives you a lop-sided grin as she hops into the empty swing next to you.
“Look what I can do,” she says. Then she’s some sort of school yard monkey, shimmying up the swing’s chains like they’re vines. She reaches the top bar and hugs her body to it, kicking her feet out against empty space. You open your mouth to tell her that she shouldn’t be doing that, but stammer and look at the ground instead.
“Look!” Following her command, your eyes move back up to see that she’s hanging upside down now. Her hair falls like an upside down halo. Her knees are buckled above the top bar, and her fingers are tensed and white in their fight to keep holding onto the bar. If you were standing on your head, you would think she was sitting on the sky. Down the hill, you hear the shout of the teacher on duty, wondering how the ragamuffin escaped her sight. You want to glance toward the adult, but you can’t look away.
“Here I go!” she cries. Her hands let go of the top bar, and her body slips down a bit. Her knees stay locked, keeping her from falling. She starts rocking her torso back and forth, swinging in her own unique way. You tilt your head and smile. It does look fun.
Then, just as the adults get close, her knees give out.
She falls to the ground head first, and gives a small shriek of surprise as she drops. Her head hits the plastic sling that makes up the seat of her swing, and her body twists unnaturally with the impact. She goes limp, and the rest of her hits the dirt. She lies still for a moment, face down on the swing. Down the hill, the teachers’ weary protests turn to momentary panic as they begin running toward her.
After a long moment, she finally moves. Her arms tremble as they move, and she pushes herself off of the swing and onto her knees in the dirt. The adults start to scream at her, letting her know how close she came to a broken neck. As they’re carrying her to the nurse’s office, she looks at you through tearless eyes. She says something that gets lost in the chaos of concerned parents, but you think you can read her lips.
“That was so cool.”
***
The desert sun should be hot, but you shiver slightly at this altitude. You step up to the cliff’s edge and idly kick or stone off. It drops quickly, and soon it’s out of sight. If you’re not careful, that could be you…
“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” she says.
***
A few months later, the two of you walk home through melting snow. She has a few stitches on her forehead now from when she played too roughly with the neighbor’s dog. The tiny scar points like an arrow down to her tomboyish smile.
“Look what I can do,” she says out of the blue. Before you can even respond, she’s upside down, wavering slightly as she moves along the cold and muddy sidewalk with slow steps of her hands. She makes it about three steps before letting herself fall forward and then climbing back onto her feet.
“That’s easy,” you say, trying your best not to be impressed with the showoff.
“Then you do it,” she challenges defensively, wiping the slush off of her bare hands.
You pause for a moment, and excuses flood into your brain. You never actually give voice to any of those excuses, though, because the truth is that you want to see if you can do it, too.
“Watch this,” you say, handing her your backpack as you reach up in preparation. The coldness of the ground surprises you when you lunge forward, but you manage to keep steady enough to stall in the air for a moment. For the space of two or three seconds, you are some sort of magic trick. You can’t see her, but you’re sure that she’s finally impressed with you. Now you only have to complete the trick. You reach out your right hand to take your first circus-step, but it comes down wrong and slips. You body tumbles forward, and you let out a small shout of pain as your knee hits the curb. You finally land face-down, ruining your school jacket. Pulling yourself back into a sitting position, you roll up your pants to see blood bubbling forth from your knee in a dark red pool. Even still you don’t cry, although you feel like you want to when you look up at her and find her running off. You sit alone on the curb, not crying for what seems like hours. Your leg stiffens and aches as the blood oozes forward. Finally, you get ready to stand.
“Don’t move!” Her voice seems more distant than her heavy footfalls as she runs toward you through the slush and muck, waving something small in the air above her head. In another moment she’s next to you, peeling the plastic away from the band-aid and carefully sealing it over your wound.
“You should be more careful,” she says with a small laugh.
***
On the edge of the cliff is a row of small white flowers, all collected in a large bush. The bush leans over the edge of the cliff and looks like it is about to leap off. You want to call them suicide flowers, but she calls them by their proper name, the cliffrose. She reaches over to the edge of the long drop, plucks one of the flowers off the bush, and wraps the blossom up in her hair.
“You don’t have to be afraid with me,” she says, hefting her hang glider and preparing for a long leap. “Like I already said, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
You take one last survey of the scenery, especially the red-orange sand down below. You pick up you glider and smile at her.
“Look what I can do,” you say, leaping off the cliff and catching the wind.
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