The Fall was awarded the $300 2nd place prize in The Midnight Writer’s Contest. It was published in The Anthem Review.
The apple's name was in its color.
The apple was clay vermillion, rounded out of the granite by the rush of river that ran by it. A small pool, water hewn, near the maw of The Fall, shallow enough to swim in and shielded from the flow of water by jutting rocks, so that if you were careful the current wouldn’t push you towards the cusp and over.
The river narrowed between two granite cliffs towards its end, and there were two small falls that came before The Fall. The river stretched on between them, so that it was like this: the river coursing, and the first fall, and a stretch of river, and the second fall, and a third stretch - the most dangerous. And then the apple tucked into the cliff wall at the end of it, and a few feet later, The Fall.
It was all lush along the cliffs from spray of the water, with plants and moss cutting an emerald gash through the gray.
And there was a bridge that ran across the river over the first fall, and it was painted old red, and made from the pine trees around the town. From the bridge you could look down the river and see the viridian ripples, water veins clear and bright and silver-licked, the wash of bubbles forced under a surface of smelted topaz. And you could see the falls, and The Fall’s mouth, and the apple tucked there next to it, a red circle with a leaf of green moss.
Few had ever swam it. Not too many people bothered with the apple, anymore. Maybe they never had. But there were stories.
James looked at Martin and saw he was frightened. The water was loud and swollen from the rain. Over by the start of the bridge was a jut of stone that sloped uneven down the face of the wall on the side of the first fall, and if you jumped over the beams of the handrail you could grab onto the rock and climb down. From there you could go across to the second fall, and then over the wet stone and down into the apple, by the Fall’s jowls, where the water spilled out for five hundred feet.
James moved his hand and felt something catch on the rail. He looked at it and saw a red shiv of wood stuck into his palm. It was an old bridge and the rails were frayed. He pinched the sliver between his nails and when he pulled it out a mercury bead of blood popped forth and then grew into a stream, and he watched as a drop dripped down into the cascade.
“C’mon, Marty. Enough lookin’ at it. You gonna swim?” Thomas said behind them on the bridge. James heard the sound of his spitting.
James looked past Martin and at the older boy who was standing at the middle of the bridge in his overalls with the clasp on one shoulder undone. Behind him were the others: Travis and Darla and Brigitte.
James looked back at Martin and he could see Martin swallow before he said anything.
“Of course I’ll swim.”
Thomas shifted his erupting jaw back and forth and then hocked some spit over the railing.
James saw Martin clutching the rail with his hand. His face was still scared.
“Well, c’mon, then, if you’re gonna swim it,” Thomas said.
Thomas had an ugly, fat face despite the slim of his body, and too many freckles and a nose that was too old for his fifteen years. James had always felt that uneasy recklessness in Thomas; there was something wild in Thomas that shone sometimes and it was showing now.
Martin turned over towards the others. Especially he looked at Darla. James couldn’t see him looking but he knew that he was. Then he turned back again towards the water.
“I’ll do it, I said.”
Thomas smiled with his teeth like a too-crowded graveyard. James hated him for smiling then. He put his hand on Martin’s shoulder and he wanted to say something but then Martin looked at him and he saw that steely green fright that meant he was going to do it.
“I can swim it, James.”
James ground his molars together trying to figure out something to say but he couldn’t think of anything. Martin was still looking at him with those eyes like frothing green pools. He was settled on it now.
Martin broke out from his hand and went over in front of Darla.
“I’m going down now,” he said.
“Ok,” Darla said. She was looking at him hard. She was scared too but she looked pretty still in her green dress with little flowers on it. Her voice was like the first time he’d smelled lavender, James thought.
“You can do it, Martin!” Travis said. Travis wasn’t wearing a shirt, only his ripped jean shorts that were worn from the sun, and he had a farmer’s tan on his arms and you could tell the hot sun was burning his chest. He looked very young standing there. He was thirteen, like the rest of them.
Brigitte only stood there, quiet in her sunhat. James couldn’t tell what she was thinking about. She wasn’t looking at Martin, but out towards the horizon, over the Fall, at the valley. Then she turned and looked at James, and he looked away quickly.
“Watch me,” Martin said, and Darla nodded and smiled at him before he turned around back towards James and began to walk past him to where the jutting rock was. James said nothing as Martin walked by. Then,
“Martin,”
“No.”
James grated his teeth. He wanted to give some reassurance, some encouragement, but Martin was already one leg dangling into the misty air and grabbing onto the rock. And then he was off the bridge, and making his way down.
Thomas, Travis and Darla ran over to look as Martin disappeared behind the red painted wood. Brigitte lingered behind.
It was done now, and what would happen with the apple would happen.
James went over to the railing, a little apart from Thomas and Travis and Darla. He could see Martin already ten feet down the rock wall, scrambling down over the fractured blue crags with a quickness. Martin was a good climber, but the rock here wasn’t slick like it was later on, and James knew it. And Martin knew it too.
Brigitte came up next to him from behind, and she looked past him over the railing at Martin, from under the cream weaves of her hat and its red ribbon curled out on the gust. The sun was scintillating out from the azure sky and it was bright and hotter than before, and the water throbbed a bass note beneath.
“He’ll die,” she said.
“He won’t,” James said without looking at her. His palm was tight around the curve of the pine shaft railing. Martin only had another ten feet to go now before he could start climbing over. “He won’t. You see him climbing.”
“Why don’t you go and get someone?” She sounded like she was frowning.
James didn’t say anything. He couldn’t get someone now and he had thought about this already and he was frustrated that she didn’t understand it.
“If you don’t go and get someone it’ll be just like with,”
“It won’t.” He glared at her now and he willed his eyes to be settled like Martin’s had been. It wouldn’t be at all like with Steven Fargo. It couldn’t.
When he turned to her he wasn’t expecting her eyes to be as sad as they were, and seeing them broke the hardness he wrought into his words. She should not have been sad already. She could be nervous or angry or confused, but she couldn’t have yet been sad. His backlash was deflected by the nature of her countenance and the knowing blue irises, as if that which would not happen already had.
He turned to look down at Martin clutching the wall, starting over towards the second fall. James could see the slugs of sweat down Martin’s neck and his face, but he could not see that Martin’s hands were chattering, or feel the urgent door knocking in his chest driving him to answer what was ahead. He knew that Martin must feel hot because he felt very hot on the bridge in the bright light that stole the richness of the color, and a tear of his own sweat was slithering down the side of his torso from beneath his arm.
“He’s quick!” James heard Travis say from over by Thomas. He saw the stupid smile meld wrinkles into his pink cheeks again. “Wow is he quick! Quick as a billygoat! Quick as a lynx!”
Thomas kept swishing around the spit in his mouth and didn’t say anything but kept looking down at Martin. Darla wore the face of a lead actress whose lines had all flown from her mind as she stepped into the light.
“You’re quick as a lynx, Marty!” Travis leaned his skinny chest over the beam and said to him.
“I did it quicker ‘n that,” said Thomas, and he spat into the water.
“Liar,” James said. “You’re a damn liar, Thomas.”
Thomas looked over at him tepidly.
“I ain’t lyin’. I told you already I done it yesterday. Did it quicker ‘n that, surely.”
James turned away. He couldn’t look at Thomas’s stupid face and listen to the lies that had ignited all this. He knew Thomas hadn’t swum the apple. Everyone knew it but no one would tell him otherwise; no one would say it right to his fat face, even though every one of them knew there was no way Thomas had done it. But there was Martin scrambling over the rock to try for the apple down there anyway.
“Are you going to let him do it?” Brigitte punctured.
Bends of water thrashed the beaten rock of the wall and it was greased over with wet and moss. Martin’s next hold was a splintered marrow of limestone that looked to cut.
Martin pulled himself up on the bone of rock and pendulumed over the soak of the wall until his scrambling toes impaled on a stone. Then he shifted weight with a fling, and grabbed out and grappled the ledge.
“Look at ‘im go! He’s like a spider on the wall! Like an old eight legger!” Screamed Travis.
“Be careful!” Darla followed. “Be careful, Marty!”
Martin’s limbs ceased their writhing search for a moment and he turned his head up to look at them. He was squinting so the mist wouldn’t get into his eyes. James thought he looked much smaller than he had before. The water was loud.
“Will you all shut up!” James said to them desperately. “You’re distracting him.”
“You can just calm down there, James,” Thomas said. “He’s doin’ fine now.”
James tried to tune Martin, to see what his friend saw. The moss hard drenched bearding his soft cheeks, welded to the rockface by spasms of adrenalin, the sog of jean bottoms caressed by the rush. His fingers were wedged into cracks that chafed, his breath firing uneven, the engine of an old motor car, the heat of sun on his back and the noise of the water like a thousand low snakes piled and stacked and melded until they were too loud, too loud and strong under him. He was clinging and moving.
It didn’t feel real. He knew Marty was doing it, he had seen Marty doing it, and he had climbed rock before and felt cool water fleck his skin and worn wet jeans, but he couldn’t feel that now, and he didn’t understand why. He needed to feel it, to share Marty’s burden, to make Marty know that he understood, that he felt the pain in the pressure. He couldn’t though. He felt only nothing, and guilt.
“He’s stuck,” said Brigitte.
James narrowed the lids down over his eyes and raised his hand up in a salute to block the bright rays of the sun. Martin was reaching out with his foot and hand like he had been. He was bent at the knee on the foothold trying to lower himself down. He kept lowering himself down and then up, twitching and curling.
“He can’t find a foothold there,” she said.
“He won’t fall,” said James.
“Look at him,” she said.
James was about to scream at her to shut up and just let it alone and that Martin would never let himself fall into the rush and not get to the apple after all this and that it was their fault for it all from the first.
Martin felt the sun and the shouting and the thick hiss of the water resounding on the wall, his face pressed up against the moss, bearding him, premature, making him feel like he needed to shave it off. He felt the hazard of his perch and of the trembling heat in his knees and fingers, the bending of his joints like a worn rubber band on its last withered snap, but more he felt the oddness that he should be there in the first place, disassociated from himself, as if the limestone were a mirror and he was looking upon his weakening body from the other side.
But with the apple there was no going back. No going back at all.
And so, with the terrifying notion that his thoughts now were too big, that he must think only of the wall, Martin extended the fiery joint of his knee for a last time, slipped on a patch of wet moss, and fell.
James felt something like a rough sponge rubbing the bottom of his brain.
Thomas quit shifting the spit around through his teeth and Darla screamed into her woven fingers as if trying to catch Marty by catching the noise. James didn’t hear Brigitte at all and he forgot in that moment that she was there next to him.
Marty only felt very light for a moment. He felt the colossal pressure on his fingers let up, and on his knees and feet, and he could see the sun now above him with its bezel of white fluted lines not so hot on his face as they had been on his back.
Then it was quite cool, and the lightness was gone and he was being pushed and enveloped in something much greater than himself.
His body was moving but his mind felt still. The gravity of it came on very suddenly. He could not go cold from it or shiver because he was already cold in the water and had been shivering on the wall, and so the change was in his head, a heavy feeling, the feeling of being on the cusp of something, greater even than the measure of the fall and its distance, greater than his body and than the people on the bridge above and back, the sodden feather of a loss.
A granted loss, taken for granted then, of something Martin did not understand. Over the Fall, he would lose it.
He did not want to lose it. It was sobering, and he felt the chill now, and his limbs began to flail against the thickness of the water, and he knew then that he was intact, that he had fallen clean, and that he did not have to lose it, that he had not been broken like the last boy, that he could reach it.
He opened his eyes and through the glassy water with the ripples of flow he saw the vermillion streaks, clay in the limestone, the red offset pool rounded into the rock, the cavity to the Fall’s cheek ground away by a chance course of the river, the apple.
The water had carried him to it. Under it the noise was soft, a low, sweet, beautiful hiss, and Martin kicked his feet and felt the resistance and his body moving forward, past the rocks that stifled the river’s flow before the apple.
He had a fleeting feeling then, of reaching it. A graze of the clay, harder than it should have been, deeply red and filling his sight. The graze carried with it a hubris of success, the jubilance of a dance on the brink survived, a gambit successful, and a loftiness. He had reached it. Here was the apple, anathema, a force warned against, entity he had only watched. Here was the danger. Here in the red of the clay was the light that had smothered so many before him, here was respect, here was legacy, renown, here was the tale that would distinguish him, define him, shape him in its magnitude and its contours, a badge of bravery, here was a face to wear before his peers. Here, in the hard auburn ore teasing his fingers, was Darla. Here was knowledge that would spread and infame him.
From the pedestal of his graze and the fullness of it he felt an instant of haught. Here was the world, the world in that it would change his own, the world in chance clay, stone hewn, by the water. And that was just it. That was all.
On the bridge, James did not see Martin’s wild grasp for the apple. Beneath the curtain of frothing water no one on the bridge saw Martin’s fingers brush out on the clay and then slip, easily, glibly, off the hard oiled surface of it, or saw his eyes slacken off, the lash of an adult voice on a young face when the joking has ended. James, Travis, subdued Brigitte, Darla through a nest of screams, Thomas with withering, stupid elation, only saw the shape of him struggling uselessly, floating with a morbid serenity towards and over the cusp, out of memory, out of future stories forged, out of time, mercifully lacking in cognizance of it, lost in the end among a chorus of hissing flow and with the tempered regret of a fall from the closest thing to paradise he had ever known.