Freefall
By Michelle Trantham
I sit on the edge of the world, watching the sun set over the far rim of the Grand Canyon. The sudden depth of nothing that my legs dangle over has a presence: a weighty wind that scales the canyon walls up to where I am, shooting straight into the sky.
I sit on the edge of an edge; a small jut in the rock below the rim just far enough down to be jumpable for 45-year-old knees. The landing feels defiant, resistant to the millions of years of erosion and gravity that wanted it disappeared to the depths a mile down. I’m hidden from anyone on the land above me, back against the sharp rocks jutting from the plane we live on.
I’ve yearned for this view for forty years, ever since I heard the camp leader talk about it back in cub scouts. Now my hair has thinned and I’m raising little girls who are afraid of bugs, uninterested in camping or nature trips. None of that matters right now. My worries spill over the edge. I can breathe.
Jenny calls me again.
I am one thousand, one hundred and eleven miles from where her voice connects on the other end at our home in Kansas. That’s one thousand, one hundred and eleven trips down to the bottom of the canyon.
Tens of millions of years of work I’m scanning up and down with my eyes, visualizing distance by height, over and over, while she yells in my ear. I let the phone drift down into my lap, my fingers a loose cradle.
The Grand Canyon has this geological mystery called the Great Unconformity. There’s a gap in the rock layers: one layer from 250 million years ago lies right on top of rock that is 1.2 billion years old. No one knows why, or what happened to the hundreds of millions of years missing time.
Jenny is pregnant again. She thinks I’ve abandoned the family: our two daughters, our ancient dog, our unborn mystery. I’d stolen our minivan to get here. It’s a sleek sliver color, three rows of seats. It’s a family van, a soccer van, bulky under smooth lines and scuff marks. It rattles on the frame, betraying a near-decade of use by little feet, jammy hands, crummy mouths. My history is encrusted in the stains of it, parked, engine still overheating some seventy feet behind where I sit. It’s the spaceship that brought me to this alien land.
“Sorry, love, you’re breaking up.” I speak it to the wind.
Reception at the rim is spotty. The map didn’t want to load the closer I got to my destination.
Jenny yells louder. Maybe she’s crying. I can’t tell the difference between the static, the distance. I hang up, barely able to discern what is on the screen from the glare of the sunset.
A gust up the canyon wall catches the bottoms of my tennis shoes, filling my lungs past their limit. Maybe it was just enough to keep me afloat. For a second I was lost with the wind, shooting straight up into the wide, blue sky.
It rings again, pulling me off the edge. On speaker, my name echoes in doppler effect the whole mile down until it strikes rock, bursting magnificent into a hundred shards, gleaming in the evening sun.
THE END
Author Bio: Michelle Trantham is an MFA student at Lindenwood University and has an MA in Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her previous publications include CNF works in redrosethorns and Belle Ombre, and poetry in Molecule and Teach. Write. In her free time, Michelle is petting her two cats, tending to houseplants, and traveling. Instagram: @michelletranthamwrites