Descending Star

MELTDOWN

May 6, 2022

Ben awoke from his coma at around lunchtime.

Zoey got the news from Becca as she climbed out of her Acura at the Stone Table for bouldering practice. Becca had heard from her mom, who had heard from Ryan's mom, who had heard from Renée, that Ben had opened his eyes.

Zoey ground her teeth almost hard enough to crack them.

Becca joined seven teammates who sunned themselves on the flat eighty foot natural sandstone slab. None of them were dressed for practice, Zoey observed, as she adjusted her harness and filled the chalk bag from a watertight five gallon canister. They were too busy gossiping and looking cool in their Oakleys to prep themselves. Coach Lowry hadn't shown up, yet. The team was supposed to be stretching and doing calisthenics. Two senior captains sat among the lizards and basked on the hot rock.

Davy, a decent kid with wild hair and a counterproductive, repressed fear of heights, called out, "You been to the hospital, Zoe?"

She clenched her eyes. The silent-e nickname made her want to scream. "Yeah, Tuesday."

"That was the day he crashed through the window, wasn't it?" he asked the group.

Becca replied, "Yeah, it was. Hey. Zoey. They say on Tuesday he was out cold."

"That's right, he was. Coma. The visit went well. We didn't fight."

As to their sunny sandstone perch, most of them had been calling the wind-sculpted overhang the Stone Table since they'd been eleven, mooning over the kings and queens of C.S. Lewis. The flat slab cantilevered horizontally, for about six feet, from the far end of the vertical sandstone formation that the team used for climbing practice. When they'd been kids with shorter legs and weaker arms, grappling up onto the slab had been a challenging puzzle, because the Table's flat surface stood four feet above the hot sand, beyond the reach of young straddles, and its hollow underside created a shady respite from the hot desert sun at all times of the day.

Now that the kids had grown to adult stature, sitting under the Table was no longer easy, headroom being the operative complication, but they could hop up to the topside with moderate upper body exertion, and they generally stuck to the top of the slab, for tanning and preening, the underside being a haven for multi-legged, segmented crawlies big and small, most of them venomous.

Zoey alone claimed the cool, dark underside of the slab, at the far end, and she found one of the few safe holds by rote. She had it all to herself. She chalked her fingers, crab-walked to the hold, found invisible cracks with her fingertips, raised one gummy-shoed foot to a brace, and then the other. She clung to the underside of the Table, on the edge of the sunlight, three feet above cool sand and ignominious millipedes, and pressed her cheek and breasts to the stone, to commence her favorite game.

She faced an eighty foot inverted crawl, under the Table, back to sunlight on the far side. She imagined herself two thousand feet above a distant crashpad of jagged, shattered scree, hanging from the flat underside of Enduro Corner, a talismanic crevice upon the earth, perched a half mile in the sky, which for Zoey held mythical significance. She'd never been there. She danced beneath the Stone Table and imagined. A successful traverse meant life. The most trivial miscue and slip meant a two thousand foot freefall to her death.

The spider began her crawl, progress by inches, in the darkness, while shadows scurried below, with their dry, shiny carapaces on their backs, reflecting the last vestiges of sun.

With her cheek and ear against the stone, she could hear her teammates through conduction.

A couple of them were pretty good at this disreputable sport, and she could trust them to stack rope and belay. Most of them were ground-dwellers, but they were okay; they were all good buds, and she didn't like to think cynically of friends and acquaintances. These days the sentiment infected her thoughts with ease.