A Fall
Parched lips shrunken into little furrows. A pink crimson tongue, glistening, jerks across them like a sponge over a rough stone. The sun, hissing and seething, scalds the young man with its soupy, sighing heat. He blinks and swallows from it. His t-shirt is stuck with sweat to his narrow frame. His face, perspiring, expresses nothing extraneous or affected, just the heat.
He drops down off the boulder he is standing on and onto a patch of gray, brittle dirt fanned out in front of it. Without a sigh or a grunt he settles down on the warm earth with his back against the lumpy boulder. At his feet is a tall, yawning cliff.
The sun is tacked onto a board of blue sky. He tests its brightness by darting glances at it. It looks like a metallic, molten bruise.
He's stopped wiping the sweat from his forehead, it does nothing, just moves it around a little.
Finally, after another swallow, his lips part to do something besides the Sisyphean task of wetting them: he speaks. But first a smile flashes and recedes, or what is meant to be a smile, it looks more like a fleeting twitch, which gives way to speech: a scoffing "Live..."
As the word is just clearing his mouth he grips the scorched earth and heaves up onto his feet. They steady him and he walks forward. Then, slowly shuffling, and without any hesitation or dramatic pause he tumbles downward off the edge.
The only sensation he hadn't accounted for was the sudden separation from the constant, familiar tug of gravity. He was beyond any sort of instant remorse, beyond any sort of fear, both of those were already dealt with. Just the strange, almost enjoyable feeling of being unfettered from anything solid.
And then the hill jumped and struck him.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by chasestalling
