“Hold my fanny pack so I can lean over the edge a bit,” Heather says, hoping to capture that ever-elusive award-winning photograph.
Taking Heather by the waist, Tina grasps the fanny pack and responds, “Spin around so that the skinny part faces me. That’s easier to hold onto.”
“K,” Heather says, executing a pretty good pirouette for hiking shoes and cargo pants.
“All set,” Tina says, the plan already taking shape.
Heather begins composing the photo in her mind. 100 feet below the cliff her is a beautiful waterfall, colored in the reds, yellows, and greens of autumn. The sun is perfect, there’s no wind, and no stupid tourists or powerlines to ruin this photo.
First place, here I come! “Hold me!” she says with quite a bit of force as she tests the connection the fanny pack provides.
“Gotcha,” Tina responds quietly. She smiles as Heather braces one arm on a tiny evergreen, whose precarious attachment to the cliff is lost on the erstwhile female Ansel Adams. Finally, Tina eyes the pack’s clasp and decides to at least explain.
“Hey, I bet you thought I’d never find out about you and Jenny?”
Heather pauses, her finger hovering over the shutter button.
“What?”
“No, it’s who. I’d be okay with the ‘what,’ but it’s the ‘who’ that I’m not okay with.”
And with that, Tina unclips the fanny pack and slightly taps Heather in the small of the back, which gives gravity a tiny assist, and over Heather goes.
The scream reverberates through the woods and off the rocky cliff face. Then, it stops with a sudden ‘THUNK.’
Tina stands alone on the precipice, silent, soaking in what she has just done. Two minutes earlier, they’d been a couple. Now? Not so much. Adrenaline pumps through her body, and her heart races as she eyes the fanny pack. She sits on a nearby stump and turns a slow 360 degrees. Nobody. She scans the woods across the ravine. Still nobody. She turns over the fanny pack, unzipping it with no real purpose, and strains to hear survival noises from below. Silence.
With a long exhale, Tina reflects on her options. Call 911? She glances at her phone. Hmmm . . . no service. How sad.
She unzips the fanny pack and reaches in to keep her hands busy. Tina retrieves the first thing she encounters. A five-ounce beef stick. And just like that, she realizes she is hungry.
Squeezing the ends of the plastic wrapper between her right thumb and forefinger, she finally separates the two ends and slowly peels them open.
As she chews, she goes over her options.
“Guess I need to find someone, report this terrible accident. Prolly should work up some emotional response, too . . . but that’ll be easy enough.” She eyes a nearby squirrel, the only witness to her murderous morning.
“What you looking at?” she jokes in its direction.
Surprisingly, the squirrel turns and disappears, unwilling to be Tina’s next victim.
