Stanage

They approach in hungry morning light, treading the path to the ridge and the row of giant’s teeth grown crooked with the ages. Scanning the plantation below she breathes, inhaling the cold and is lifted by a curlew’s call. This is not her dying time.

Rummaging in the rucksack for her gear she says something to him, laughs then cracks on, making the opening move on the rough gritstone wall. Unimpressed, it sizes her up and they meet cheek to cheek. She pushes on, up the crack to the crosshair, and now the crux: a shimmy right below the healed fracture, as her fingers wrap round the cool lipped fissure.

Blood and chalk mingle in a rose hued wash over grazed white taped finger tips and grit rash flaring with the route’s rough turns. Sweat patches shade her back and pits, while she peers at what is to come. A glance down at him, keeping the slack as she ascends and feels for the hardware that chimes on her harness. Put the nut in the crack and give it a yank for some certainty. Inhaling deep, relaxing into the hold, she recites the script and rehearses the next move in her mind. Arms ache, straining for purchase on the sheer, unframed, abstract stone. Sectioned, blocked and geometric.

Dappled grey in every hue up here and lit by vanes of sunlight, the stone tricks her slick rubber soles as they pester for fragments of words punctuated by lichen, while the cadence changes and the vertical dance goes on. Her body is transfixed, spoked and splayed upon the weathered Edge.

Pause. Keep poised. Breathe deep and slow. Take stock for the final push. A mortifying haul up, belly squashed on to the sandwiched slabs. She tops out with the expanse ahead and lies flat on her back, gasping for air.

Paul Goodman is from Hemel Hempstead and lives and writes in Bristol. He has had poetry published in Pennine Platform and a piece flash fiction selected for The Broken Spine.