brazen granite cliffs rising on the far side, miles from where she was. And directly in front of her nothing but a gray shimmer of early summer air through which she would fall to her death, turning over and over and screaming for her mother.
Her mind was gone again, lost in that white no-brain roar of terror, but her body recognized that stopping in time to avoid going over the cliff-edge was an impossibility. All she could hope to do was redirect her motion before it was too late. Trisha swerved to the left, and as she did her right foot kicked out over the drop. She could hear the pebbles dislodged by that foot rattling down the ancient rock wall in a little stream.
Trisha bolted along the strip where the needle-coated floor of the forest gave way to the bald rock marking the edge of the cliff She ran with some confused and roaring knowledge of what had almost happened to her, and also some vague memory of a science fiction movie in which the hero had lured a rampaging dinosaur into running over a cliff to its death.
Ahead of her an ash tree had fallen with its final twenty feet jutting over the drop like the prow of a ship, and Trisha grabbed it with both arms and hugged it, her scraped and bloody cheek jammed against the smooth trunk, each breath whistling into her with a shriek and emerging in a terrified sob. She stood that way for a long time, shuddering all over and embracing the tree. At last she opened her eyes. Her head was turned to the right and she was looking down before she could stop herself.
At this point the cliff's drop was only fifty feet, ending in a pile of glacial, splintery rubble that sprouted little clumps of bright green bushes. There was a heap of rotting trees and branches, as well - deadwood blown over the cliff's edge in some long-ago storm. An image came to Trisha then, one that was terrible in its utter clarity. She saw herself falling toward that jackstraw pile, screaming and waving her arms as she went down; saw a dead branch punching through the undershelf of her jaw and up between her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo, then spearing into her brain and killing her.
'No!' she screamed, both revolted by the image and terrified by its plausibility. She caught her breath.
'I'm all right,' she said, speaking low and fast. The bramble-scratches on her arms and the scrape on her cheek throbbed and stung with sweat-she was just now becoming aware of these little hurts. 'I'm okay. I'm all right. Yeah, baby.' She let go of the ash tree, swayed on her feet, then clutched it again as panic lunged inside her head. An irrational part of her actually expected the ground to tilt and split her off the edge.
'I'm okay,' she said, still low and fast. She licked her upper lip and tasted damp salt. 'I'm okay, I'm okay.' She repeated it over and over, but it was still three minutes before she could persuade her arms to loosen their deathclutch on the ash tree a second time. When she finally managed it, Trisha stepped back, away from the drop. She reset her cap (turning it around so the bill pointed backward without even thinking about it) and looked out across the valley. She saw the sky, now sagging with rainclouds, and she saw roughly six trillion trees, but she saw no sign of human life-not even smoke from a single campfire.
'I'm all right, though - I'm okay.' She took another step back from the drop and uttered a little scream as something
(snakes snakes)
brushed the backs of her knees. just bushes, of course. More checkerberry bushes, the woods were full of em, yuck-yuck. And the bugs had found her again. They were reforming their cloud, hundreds of tiny black spots dancing around her eyes, only this time the spots were bigger and seemed to be bursting open like the blooms of black roses. Trisha had just time enough to think, I'm fainting, this is fainting, and then she went down on her back in the bushes, her eyes rolled up to whites, the bugs hanging in a shimmering cloud above her small pallid face. After a moment or two the first mosquitoes alit on her eyelids and began to feed.
Top of the Fourth
HER MOTHER was moving furniture-that was Trisha's first returning thought, Her second was that Dad had taken her to Good Skates in Lynn and what she heard was the sound of kids rollerblading past on the old canted track. Then something cold splashed onto the bridge of her nose and she opened her eyes. Another cold drop of water splashed down dead center on her forehead. Bright light ran across the sky, making her wince and squint. This was followed by a second crash of thunder that startled her into a sideways roll. She pulled instinctively into a fetal position, uttering a croaky little scream as she did so. Then the skies opened.
Trisha sat up, grabbing and replacing her baseball cap when it fell off without even thinking about it, gasping like someone who has been tossed rudely into a cold lake (and that was what it felt like). She staggered to her feet. Thunder boomed again and lightning opened a purple sewn in the air. As she stood with rain dripping from the tip of her nose and her hair tying lank against her cheeks, she saw a tall, half-dead spruce on the valley floor below her suddenly explode and fall in two flaming pieces. A moment later the rain was sheeting down so thickly that the valley was only a sketched ghost wrapped in gray gauze.
She backed up, getting into the cover of the woods again. She knelt, opened her pack, and got out the blue poncho. She put it on (better late than never, her father would have said) and sat on a fallen tree. Her head was still woozy and her eyelids were all swollen and itchy. The surrounding woods caught some of the rain but not all of it; the downpour was too fierce. Trisha flipped up the poncho's hood and listened to the drops tap on it, like rain on the roof of a car. She saw the ever-present cloud of bugs dancing in front of her eyes and waved at them with a strengthless hand. NothIing makes them go away and they're always hungry, they fed on my eyelids when I was passed out and they'll feed on my dead body, she thought, and began to cry again. This time it was low and dispirited. As she wept she continued waving at the bugs, cringing each time the thunder roared overhead.
With no watch and no sun there was no time. All Trisha knew was that she sat there, a small figure in a blue poncho huddled on a fallen tree, until the thunder began to fade eastward, sounding to her like a vanquished but still truculent bully. Rain dripped down on her. Mosquitoes hummed, one caught between the inside wall of her poncho's hood and the side of her head. She jabbed a thumb against the outside of the hood and the hum abruptly stopped.
'There,' she said disconsolately. 'That takes care of you, you're jam.' She started to get up and her stomach rumbled. She hadn't been hungry before but she was now. The thought that she had been lost long enough to get hungry was awful in its own way. She wondered how many more awful things were waiting and was glad she didn't know, couldn't see. Maybe none, she told herself Hey, girl, get happy - maybe all the awful things are behind you now.
Trisha took off her poncho. Before opening her pack, she looked ruefully down at herself She was wet from head to toe and covered with pine needles from her faint-her very first fainting spell. She would have to tell Pepsi, always assuming she ever saw Pepsi again.
