Dead Air

Erskine Grayson in the flesh steps off the elevator, followed by his publicist. Grayson’s face has been staring up at Jordy from a book jacket for the past week. This human Grayson actually looks younger than the weathered dude in the photo, with a slighter body than Jordy had pictured roaring through the woods in Grayson’s memoir, Original Man. Grayson taps the wall with each foot, dislodging clumps of muddy snow. Jordy extends his hand to shake. Grayson counters with a half wave and makes for the window behind Jordy to take in the bird’s eye view of the city. The station is a cramped warren of production offices and sound studios, but it’s got a killer view up here on forty. The city Grayson glares out on just now looks like a giant snow globe, Grayson its celestial puppeteer.

The publicist meets Jordy’s eyes. “They confiscated his knife at the airport,” she says quietly.

“I don’t go anywhere without my knife,” Grayson grumbles, and, turning from the window, wanders up the corridor inspecting the larger-than-life photos of the station’s stars lining its walls. Back home a signature hunting knife hangs from his belt at all times, Jordy knows. No doubt that’s all-around useful when you live off grid on the Olympic Peninsula, but did he honestly expect they’d let him on the plane with it?

Grayson stands under Osmo’s portrait, the head four times the size of his own. Osmo’s radio show is his first stop on a cross-country book tour. The host’s salt-and-pepper beard is trimmed, an urban sophisticate. Grayson’s drops to his neck, a bushy force of nature.

“He’s a tad disoriented,” the publicist mouths to Jordy. Her lips look like buffed leather. At a gala two years back, she’d sidled up and told him he was sweet. And cute, she’d whispered, her lips grazing his ear. You’re way more put together than the other public radio schlubs, she said. Next thing he knew he was waking up naked and hungover in her bright studio apartment on the upper east side regretting his poor self control. Luckily ever since she’s seemed as committed as him to keeping things light and friendly.

He settles Grayson at the console facing Osmo and fits him with a set of headphones. Osmo offers Grayson a hearty handshake, then looks back at his cellphone to finish a text before tucking it away. Through the giant studio window, the engineer signals that the station ID is winding down. Jordy angles the mike at Grayson’s chest and hustles out. Just as he pulls the padded door shut, Osmo’s theme music starts up. Jordy joins the engineer in the control room and perches in his spot by the window, within easy reach of a mike to talk into Osmo’s ear, if need be. Usually he finds the pre-show routine a satisfying choreography, but not today. Today he’s on autopilot. An intern who’d started long after him got handed an assistant producer position on the syndicated show News Eye. It’s a coveted spot, a climb into bigger leagues. She must have had some kind of connection, or maybe it was a function of the station’s commitment to gender parity. Whatever. Jordy thought it was his. It should have been.

Osmo guides Grayson through the interview Jordy has prepped. Jordy’s the one who reads the books, sees the films, goes to the plays, the concerts, the restaurants. Osmo hews close to Jordy’s line of questioning. Just now he’s prompting Grayson to relate how he grew up in the burbs, spent his childhood outdoors learning the ways of the natural world, and how, as a young man squatting in a teepee in the northern Cascades, tripping on ayahuasca, he’d had a vision. Ever since, his mission has been to bring the harsh but profound realities of the wilderness to those cut off from nature, those who, unlike himself, are only half alive. People pay him–into the six figures, Jordy discovered in his background research–to live out in the middle of nowhere doing back-breaking labor for three months at a time.

The book was an entertaining read, though it left Jordy thinking of Grayson basically as a player with a God complex, suckering people into doing his work for him and catering to his whims. Through the window, now, Grayson looks like a diminished replica. There’s a band of sweat collecting along his hairline and his leg has been shaking nonstop since the interview got underway. Must feel strange not to have the grounding tug of your trusty knife, Jordy thinks. Huckster though the dude may be, he feels a bit sorry for him.

His phone vibrates. He steps into the corridor. It’s the publicist, who’d taken off before the show. Something’s come up. She won’t be picking Grayson up afterwards. Would Jordy escort him to his hotel? Grayson doesn’t know the city, might get lost.

“I’ll put him in an Uber,” Jordy says. He has slotted in some precious hours this afternoon to work on his resume. If he doesn’t make a move, he’s going to end up orbiting Osmo for life.

“Terrific, thanks for that,” says the publicist, clicking off. Is she miffed? Jordy wonders. She sounded miffed. Maybe there are some lingering feelings from their night together, after all. But who is she to just assume he’d be free to chaperone her client? It’s demeaning. Friends from school are out in the world in flak jackets reporting from war zones, roaming borderlands with refugees, exploring the devastations of climate change. Even interns are surpassing him, now.

“Once I sewed fourteen stitches on my face after my horse tripped on a tangle of Sequoia root under a new moon,” Grayson is telling Osmo. Jordy is back in the control room. “Sliced my cheek open.”

There’s a two second lag between words spoken in the studio and the audio coming out the speakers. After four years, Jordy still finds the gap disconcerting, as though the body before your eyes is a pre-recorded image.

“Soooo,” Osmo says, his voice sinking to a buzzy bass. Regular listeners would note the tone shift that Jordy knows so well. We’re just a couple of pals trading secrets in a bar, is the message. Never you mind the thousands who are tuned in across the tristate area.

“Tell us about this incident with the dead–” Osmo checks the script, “–with the roadkill?” He telegraphs concern and deep empathy as he scans the text and peeks quickly at the next page. His eyes widen slightly, fingers stroking his goatee. He hasn’t read through it beforehand, Jordy sees. “What happened there?”

Grayson blinks. Time hangs. Jordy counts one, two, three excruciating seconds of dead air, that dreaded radio silence.

“You forced your girlfriend to eat roadkill, didn’t you?”

Grayson twists from the mike and coughs, releasing a spray of backlit spittle. The engineer winces and nudges a lever on his soundboard. Jordy picks up the mike wired into Osmo’s headset, ready to feed him a fresh line of inquiry, if this silence continues. He’s become a pro at constructing the invisible armature that lets Osmo maintain control over his guests while creating the illusion of spontaneity. For this magic act to work, the conversation sometimes needs to be tweaked on the fly, with Jordy jumping in to keep it moving.

Finally Grayson’s lips move. “Well, forced? If you want to know, like it says in my book–” His voice is tight. “She knew my rule. If the fleas are alive and jumping on the pelt, it isn’t foul.”

“Fascinating,” Osmo says brightly. “Please go on.”

“One morning before dawn I’m dumpster diving behind the Super Saver and on my way back to camp I spot a freshly killed critter on the parkway.”

Jordy breathes out. Crisis averted.

“I bring it back to the cabin, put it on ice, go about my business–all day long I’m hauling logs, up and back, up and back–serious work. Come home late, hungry and beat.”  Grayson pauses, holds up a finger. His leg has stopped shaking. “She’s got one job. One. Job. Supper’s supposed to be on the table when I get home. Is supper on the table? Nope. She’s gone soft on me and buried it!”

“I see,” Osmo says, his voice betraying a hint of merriment. “What kind was it?”

Raccoon, Jordy mouths.

“She’s wasted a perfectly good animal. What kind–? Oh. A badger, I think. Or raccoon, maybe. Yeah, raccoon. What’d I say in the book?” He gazes around, intending to look it up.

“Well, waste not, want not, I guess, hm?” says Osmo.

“Exactly!” Grayson slaps the console. The engineer silently beseeches Jordy to get a handle on his guest. “Waste not, want not! Precisely. That’s the name of the chapter, in fact.”

“So, then you–” urges Osmo.

“So then I– What? Like I said, I’m beyond hungry. I hand my lady a shovel and a headlamp and send her back into the woods to find the hole she buried it in. She digs it up, fries it over the fire with some onions, salt and pepper. We eat.”

“She ate it?”

“Yeah, course she did. Tasted great.”

Osmo looks down, checks the script, looks back at Grayson. “And then you had sex.”

One. Two. Three. Jordy stares at Grayson’s lips. The man’s mouth, and eyes, now, are shut.

“Well,” he says, finally. “That’s not– Sort of– Well, yes.” He lets out a dry laugh. “You got the sequence of events.”

“Your father, he was very demanding, wasn’t he?”

Classic Osmo, abruptly switching gears. It’s a technique Jordy introduced and is secretly proud of. Keeps guests following Osmo’s lead. If he were to just let the conversation flow organically, Osmo would find himself out in a blank desert, his ignorance laid bare. Can’t have that.

“Well, yeah, he was, but that’s a whole ‘nother chapter.”

“Would you say there are anger issues at work when it comes to your relationships with women?”

He’s ad-libbing, but all is well. Jordy’s baked this interpretation into the script.

“You have a need to control them, don’t you?”

Again the empty seconds, Jordy willing Grayson’s lips to move.

“A person wants to be around me,” he says, finally, “man, woman, half-and-half, haha, whatever–they gotta understand that there’s something I’m trying to put across. Some of them can hack it, some–leave.”

“Tough love,” Osmo chuckles. “But isn’t it true that your father ridiculed you as a kid? Quizzed you in front of your sisters, tripped you up, then mocked you?”

Grayson shifts on his stool, leg bouncing again. “Welp, doc, I guess sometimes it’s easier to stitch up your own cheek than figure out what to do with people.”

“Especially women,” Osmo adds.

Grayson opens his mouth to respond but Osmo slides into his closing without offering the author any last words.

“Thank you, Mr. Erskine, Mr. Grayson, for coming on my show today. Mr. Grayson will be signing his memoir, Original Man, at Coliseum Books tonight at seven thirty.”

Jordy leads the original man back up the hallway to the elevator. It wasn’t the smoothest segment ever, but Osmo hit all his marks. He turns to congratulate Grayson, then realizes the guest is hanging way back by the studio door, wagging his head back and forth like he’s trying to shake off a punch.

Jordy pulls out his phone. A little after two, which he knew. He’s feeling pressured. He needs to get home to work on his resume before a pre-concert cocktail party with the  cast and crew of an avant-garde opera opening at BAM. Atonal work isn’t his thing, but Osmo is interviewing the set designer tomorrow.

“Everything alright?”

“Man!” Grayson says. He’s clearly been waiting for Jordy to come back for him.

“What’s up?”

“Ambushed!”

“Hm?”

“Blindsided!”

Jordy holds his arm out, motioning Grayson to walk ahead of him.

“Like that couple of paragraphs is it out of three hundred forty pages. The guy just clamps down and doesn’t let go. Just keeps hitting it, and hitting it, and hitting it!” He smacks his hand with a fist in time to his words.

“Oh,” Jordy says from behind. “Yeah. Osmo can be a little intense, I guess.” They’re at the elevator. He slaps the down button. Fuck.

“Intense? Asshole set me up!”

Jordy stares at the gilded elevator dial, heat rising up his neck. He’d relished dissecting Grayson’s nature on paper without thinking how it might feel to be on the receiving end of Osmo’s interrogation. He stupidly hadn’t foreseen Grayson would be the touchy sort. The arrow crawls and pauses, crawls and pauses, from lobby to floor to floor to floor. It’s an old skyscraper–elements, grand and less grand, recollect its former stature.

“Thinks he knows–” Grayson looks around. “Hey, where’s–?”

“Oh, Becca? She had to be somewhere, said to tell you she’ll pick you up at the hotel later for the reading. She asked me to get you into a cab.”

“Damn!” Grayson drops onto an overstuffed chair in the waiting area. “Everybody’s turning on me today.”

The elevator dings.

“Good to go, man?” Jordy asks.

The temperature has dropped ten degrees since this morning and it‘s snowing harder than it had been.  The March weather has been unstable. Today the hopeful and the clueless went outside underdressed. Jordy doesn’t count himself part of either group, normally, but he only has on a blazer over a tee-shirt and his Converse hightops. He got distracted when he woke up and looked at Instagram this morning, where the intern was crowing about her new gig. Dozens of thumping hearts, party hats, gifs of delighted surprise poured in from her vast network of colleagues and friends.

“Brisk out, huh?” he asks, looking up from his phone, where he’s been arranging the Uber. But he’s talking to himself–Grayson has wandered off again. “Jesus,” he mutters.

Going around to the side of the building, he picks Grayson out across the open plaza, gawking up at the downtown towers while workers plow past, rushing to someplace with heat. He must be freezing standing there in his thin suede jacket, Jordy thinks, stuffing his own hands into his pockets and pulling his shoulders to his ears. Then again, Grayson probably doesn’t even notice–he’s endured far worse than a spring snowstorm. The chapter comes into Jordy’s mind where Grayson hunts, kills, guts, skins and tans a deer single handedly. Is his jacket the deer? The thought startles him. The scene was bloody and grotesque and riveting. But there’s a disconnect between the master of the universe of the book and this lost, hurt man. Jordy feels bad he got him cornered on live radio. It had seemed like such a brilliant hook last night when he was sitting in his cave-like apartment writing up the interview. He’d even felt a tiny moment of exaltation, that all too rare rush he gets when he has a flash of insight.

A few feet from Grayson, a group of pigeons stand at attention, laser focused on a woman in galoshes who dips her hand into a bag of stale bread. Grayson gazes at the birds, for some reason entranced by this scene.

The blip of an idea blinks faintly in Jordy’s brain. Maybe he can spin his initial research on Grayson into a long-form piece and get it published someplace reputable, create a more meaty portrait, for once, than the shallow glosses he bangs out for Osmo’s twenty minute segments. He watches Grayson wade stealthily into the midst of the flock. The birds shuffle to make room, unperturbed, as though his presence among them is a given. The Original Man in the City! Jordy thinks. The signal is getting stronger. Brilliant. He will tell Osmo tomorrow that he’s taking an emergency leave of absence and tag along with Grayson on his book tour. This could catapult him out of his hole and into something new, something important.

“Well carpe diem, dude,” he says aloud, and strides across the plaza toward Grayson. “Hungry?” he calls out, nearing the flock. Wings beat frantically. The birds rise, then land a few feet away and carry on with their meal.

The hole-in-the-wall burger joint is tucked behind a floor-length curtain off the lobby of a midtown office tower. There’s no sign, no storefront, no website. You just have to know about it. Jordy’s mind is stuffed with insider info like this.

“Wonder what the Board of Health would say about this spot,” says Grayson, glancing around.

What’s their stance on roadkill? Jordy wants to ask, but makes a silent vow to check his urban sarcasm and be nice.

The line to the order window snakes past their little table, out the door, and down a dim, low-ceilinged passageway. They were lucky to get seats.

“Hey, lemme ask you something,” Grayson says, mouth full of burger.

“Shoot.” Jordy slips a brownie out of the brown bag used in lieu of plates and breaks off a piece. The belt of a man on line brushes his shoulder and he scoots his chair closer to the table to make room. This place has gotten too popular for its own good.

“What’d you take in school to end up working for that guy?”

“Who, me? I have a BA in Media and Design Ecologies.”

Grayson laughs. “I was about to say you should get another job, but –”

“I just tried to, actually, but this intern, Fiona, got it instead.”

This just popped out. For a second, his eyes get watery. He hadn’t said it aloud to anyone, yet.

“Fuckin’ Fiona,” Grayson says.

“Exactly, fuckin’ Fiona.” He clears his throat. Maybe it’s a good thing he’s admitted this. Showing a little vulnerability might help build trust.

Grayson reaches over and picks up the other half of Jordy’s brownie. “Go back to Wales or wherever, bitch.”

He dangles the brownie above his gaping mouth, then drops it in and downs it like a seal gobbling a fish.

Jordy laughs. “Hey, listen, I had an idea,” he says. “I was thinking, tell me what you think, what if I do a story about you, like about you on your book tour.”

“Oh, you write?”

“Well, yeah, you know, just– I want to, anyway.”

“Huh,” Grayson says, with a little nod, as though working through a mental puzzle. “Hey, how can you work for that guy?”

“Who? Osmo?”

“He’s a genuine sonofabitch.”

“He really went after you, didn’t he? Though, I mean, to be fair you did put that story about the raccoon in your book, though, right? So it’s not like–”

“As a lesson in resource conservation,” says Grayson. “He made it into some kind of grizzly psychodrama.”

“I hear you,” Jordy says. He should come clean, confess and apologize.  And, perversely, he wants credit for his insight. But it would be an act of self-sabotage to come clean to Grayson, now.

“But…I mean, you did put that stuff in the book,” he presses. “Could there actually be something to what he was asking?”

Grayson stares at Jordy for a long moment. “There ya go,” he says, finally, and lets out a laugh. “Bingo. Your very own Osmo moment.”

“Ha, I’ll take that as an insult,” Jordy says.

“Only better,” adds Grayson. “You out-Osmo’d Osmo.”

A chair squeals against the floor at the table beside them. A young woman gets up to go. Her skirt hikes up from the static of her pantyhose, showing a shock of hot pink thong through the flesh-hued netting. She yanks the skirt into place. Grayson makes as though to scoot his chair forward to give her space, but when she’s right behind him he angles it back an inch–the chair lets out a brief shriek. Her hip brushes his cheek.

“Oop, sorry.” Grayson grins up at her. The girl turns her back to them and sidles quickly past.

“This place is tight,” Grayson says, raising his eyebrows at Jordy.

Jordy glances around, embarrassed to be seen as wingman to this specimen of toxic masculinity.

“Ask me something real,” says Grayson.

They’re back outside, walking the remaining blocks to the hotel. It’s still frigid but the snow has slacked off. Late afternoon sun is slipping in and out.

“What?”

“Ask me something real.”

Implying what? Jordy thinks, a knot gathering in his chest. He is cold. He can’t think of a thing. “Let’s see,” he says. “Do you get lonely spending so much time alone?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

Jordy laughs. This is not going to be easy. A woman wrapped in an ankle length coat inches along in front of them. Jordy dodges around her, Grayson in tow, and they round the corner onto Fifth. A weasel-like dog nips at Grayson’s heels, straining on its leash, evidently eager to get to the park entrance across the street.

“Did you know there are 19,993 trees in Central Park?” Jordy pulls this from god knows where.

“No, man, that’s not a question.” Grayson stops suddenly, causing a near collision with the man and his dog. The man clucks and crosses Fifth. Grayson doesn’t even notice. He’s busy counting out a pile of coins in his palm, then approaches a street vendor and buys a little paper bag of chestnuts. Jordy gapes at the transaction. He’s lived in Manhattan his entire life and never eaten a chestnut, period, much less tried one from a cart.

“This city makes me hungry, man,” Grayson says. His mood has certainly lifted. He extends his arm,  jiggling the bag under Jordy’s nose. His wiry frame seems to hold a store of excess energy that comes shooting out of him at unexpected moments, Jordy notices.

“Thanks, I’m full,” says Jordy.

He crosses the street on the diagonal. Grayson hesitates, looks both ways, steps off the curb, then backs up onto it. An e-bike whizzes past, going against traffic. They meet on the other side and walk north, the high stone wall of the park beside them. Jordy is still trying to think of something to ask. What is something real?

“Okay, here’s something,” he says finally. “How do you navigate living the life you live, turning it into a book, then going out and promoting it? I mean, it must feel like a disconnect–do you ever feel like you’re getting off track?”

In the pause that follows, he is disturbed to realize he’s counting the seconds of dead air under his breath. One, two, three. The boundary between humans feels so sharp, so impossible to bridge.

“No, man,” Grayson says after a while. “I never feel like that.” He lifts his chin to the sky. He sniffs the air. “We’re in for more snow.”

Jordy gazes up. The scatter of clouds have pulled into a uniform pale gray mass in the past half hour. It’s going to be dark soon.

“Didn’t even read my book, I bet,” says Grayson.

“What? Who?”

“Just skipped around looking for ways to nail me.”

Jordy chews his upper lip.

Grayson blinks and squints at Jordy. “Hey, what did you say your job at the station was supposed to be, besides babysitting rubes like me?”

“I help Osmo, you know, like, with his scripts.”

“Scripts?” A steely light lowers like a gate over Grayson’s eyes. He smiles, but there’s something vicious in it.

“Yeah, well, not like strict scripts or anything, you know, just–” Fuck. He picks up the pace, then realizes that Grayson has wandered off yet again. Ten yards back was a gap in the wall, with a path into the park. Should’ve put the fucker in an Uber.

“Fine, find your own goddamn way,” he says aloud. He crosses Fifth and down a side street to catch the 6 downtown. But his mind is still on Grayson. What does he make of Central Park, he wonders, with its curated landscapes crafted to appear like they’ve sprung up naturally? He stops. The question just came into his head. He doesn’t know the answer already. It’s open-ended. Is this something real? It’s something he’s genuinely curious about. Does that count? It will have to be good enough, for now.

He moves into the park at a clip, through a stone underpass that reeks of urine, skirting puddles of slush, a square of foil catching the light like a gem. On the other side, no Grayson. At a fork in the path, he pauses. Would Grayson have been drawn toward the stately promenade opening out onto a graceful lawn or would he have taken the path into a wilder, lonelier region, dimmed by a dense clot of trees? No contest. But after hiking deeper into the woods, there’s still no trace of him. Could be he guessed wrong. Something pings off his head, something small like a pebble. He swipes at it. Another ping. He scans the trees. And there, not ten feet away, up on a limb arching across the path, squats Erskine Grayson, arms dangling like an orangutan, grinning.

“We need to put one of those electronic anklets on you,” Jordy says, grinning back, happier than he’s been all day.

Something skitters out from behind a rock and he whips around, startled. “Whoa!” he shouts.

Grayson lets out a long belly laugh. A squirrel heads for the chestnut he’d lobbed at Jordy. Grayson tosses another in the squirrel’s direction, laughing some more. He seems to think Jordy’s fear is hysterical.

“Know what? If you’re all set, I’m gonna take off,” says Jordy. This was a mistake.

Grayson splits open a nut with his teeth, sniffs it. “Peppery. Gummy. Not bad. Peace, brother.” He tosses it down to Jordy.

Jordy flicks it into the bushes in the direction of the squirrel. “I’m good.”

“Wish I had my blowgun.”

Grayson hops off the limb, landing lightly beside Jordy. “Better yet, my knife. I could pin that sucker to the trunk of that beech.” He points up the path and the squirrel makes a dash for the very tree, as if he had it on a leash.

“Tell you how you nail ‘em,” Grayson says. He squints and aims, miming the action of flinging his knife. The move is so precise that Jordy, heart speeding, pictures the glinting blade whirring through the air and, gazing toward the tree, half expects to see the squirrel splayed out there, entrails dripping.

“Think of someone whose guts you can’t stand and put their face on whatever you’re aiming at. Works like a charm.”

“That’s easy,” Jordy says, picturing the sharp, shifty features of Fucking Fiona. “Who would you pick, your Dad?” Instantly he wishes he could swallow it back.

“Mm, could be, could be,” Grayson says, running a hand down the length of his beard. “Only today, think I’m gonna have to go with Mr. Osmo Baskin.”

Jordy gives a little laugh.

“Or should it be…” He points into the air, then directly at Jordy. “Should it be you, brother man?”

Jordy’s face swells with heat and he bucks back, as though Grayson has poked him.

“This was a mistake,” he says, and heads back up the path. Total mistake. A loud crackling stutters across the sky, startling a flurry of birds from the bushes. He gazes up. A curtain of snow advances toward him, as though the air itself has become visible, as though Grayson himself has conjured the storm, like he’s some kind of damned warlock, the natural world at his beck and call. A heavy limb creaks above. Breaking off where it joins the trunk, it crashes to the ground a foot in front of him. He cries out, tripping backwards and falling hard on the ground. He sits, butt aching, stunned, watching the snowburst cover up a million shades of browns, blacks, pinks, and greens with its ragged white-blue sheet. Ice water seeps into his pants. He flutters his lids to shed the snow crystals and twists around. What happened to Grayson? Gone again? His heart thuds. He tugs his phone out of his pocket. His fingertips, bright pink, hurt with cold. Who should he call? And say what? He hasn’t told anyone where he is. Someone needs to be aware. But this fear is irrational, an overreaction. No one has ever been buried in a snowdrift in Central Park. No one has died of exposure, nor disappeared without a trace. This is the sort of thing he knows. Yet he is terrified. Becca is the most recent name in his call log. He presses the icon to dial her number but gets no signal. He has never felt so alone.

Then, through the storm, he detects a howling. He stands, slaps slush from his frozen backside, and follows the sound. A branch scratches his face–he’s lost the path. A twenty foot boulder rises before him. He hears the howling again. Coyote? There are definitely packs of coyotes roaming the park. He’s read about them. He cranes his neck and a dark figure materializes atop the rock like a cutout in the sky. There is Grayson, spinning round and round, whooping into the whirling snow. He looks either insane or demonic or majestic up there. Jordy doesn’t care which, he’s so relieved. He laughs.

“It’s safer above tree line!” Grayson calls down. “Get up here!”

A  thicket of shrubs and vines crowds the rock on both sides. The only visible part of the boulder presents a sheer, vertical rise.

“C’mon! You’ve got this!”

Jordy finds a foothold and starts climbing.

“Hey!” Grayson shouts down. “Alright!”

Five feet off the ground, snow pecking crowlike at his cheeks, Jordy pauses on a two-inch ledge. Why is he doing this? Because he’s afraid of being alone? Or is it about chasing a good story? Friends put themselves in far more dangerous spots around the world. Is he trying to prove something? His arms are stretched so far above his head that he thinks he might be ripping ligaments in his armpits. The sharp outcropping of stone he’s barely got hold of feels like it’s about to crack off and send him flying.

He wants nothing to do with Grayson’s freakish machismo. Yet another part of him desperately wants to impress the guy. And, too, if he could just get half in touch with the release and joy that Grayson seems to he feeling up there on the rock, he’d be a far happier man, himself. He grunts, lifting a leg toward an indentation in the rock to serve as his next foothold, but it’s not deep enough. It is upsetting to feel this confused. His foot drops back and his shoe slips off,  landing below. He is dangling by his fingertips.

Leaning out over the cliff, Grayson urges him on like a swim coach. Jordy swings his right leg wide to reach another foothold. It’s too far. He misses, tries again. Misses. He’s nearly halfway up the rock face and there’s nowhere to go. A hysterical laugh rises in his throat. He moans.

Above, he hears the snap of Grayson’s pocket watch.

“Oop, geez, would you look at the time? I gotta get a move on,” he says. “I’ve got books to sell!” Jordy cranes his neck to see. Grayson clicks his boots together and salutes Jordy, who whimpers.

“Thanks for the memories, man,” Grayson says. Then he drops off the other side of the boulder, and is gone.

Above the trees, the sky is darkening and the snow keeps coming. Jordy is too far up the rock to jump backward without breaking an ankle or a knee when he lands, or worse. There are no more footholds to get him to the top. He hangs, suspended, unable to go up or down.

You can learn more about Wendy by clicking on her link:  https://thievingmagpie.org/wendy-scheir-bio/