Snowdonia 2001

Paul Negri

By Paul Negri

…Stewart’s mind raced and came to rest in a quaint inn and hovered over a rough wooden table spread with cheeses, fruits, fresh-churned butter, crusty loaves of rustic bread and a stone pitcher of cold spring water...faintly in the background, perhaps from another room or outside the inn altogether, the distant murmur of voices barely intruded...

“We don’t have much time. Stewart, can you help? Please. Stewart. We need help.”

…Margaret looked so much better now. Her face was bright, but gently so, like a mountain sunrise on a misty morning. It was the mountain air, of course, clean and clear and sparkling as a brook running over stones. How had she arranged it all? She was a wizard at producing little miracles, but this…

“No, no, no. I can’t. Do something else, think of something else.”

… from the other room, the voices of cheer, the sweet tones of family and friends together, carried softly on the country-still air, and from the open window the fresh orangey scent of wild orchids in the chalk grasslands across the road, the pink blossoms nodding in the sun-bright breeze and dear Margaret nodding her approval…

“We need something heavier. It’s cracked but it won’t give. Stewart, for Christ’s sake.”

…Stewart was content to savor the cheeses without tasting, leaving the knife pristine, the bright white Dolwen from ewes’ milk, the wedge of Llangloffan White Farmhouse, the blue-veined Perl Las, redolent of the Welsh countryside and the ancient stones of the Great Orme, flavors to be felt by sight, tactile without touch, beyond the reach of space and time, like Margaret, gone but never absent…

“Lift, come on now, hurry. A little higher. On your shoulders. Oh dear Christ.”

…and signed on the plaster ceiling between the broad wood beams the names of those who hiked the hills and paced the peaks of Snowdonia to train for the conquest of Everest, Hillary and Norgay, Hunt and Band and Bourdillon, who would reach the top of the world and live to tell about it, then sit at this rough-hewn table and talk of danger and daring, and risks worth taking for no discernible reason, but for all that no less admirable, as Margaret knew and loved so well and bade Stewart in those heady days gone by to climb and climb and not look down…

“Now!”

…thunder from the clear sky and such a rush of wind, bracing and cleansing, and setting the rough-hewn table rattling and the stone pitcher of cold spring water wobbling, Margaret rising, the worker of miracles, and Stewart with tongues of flame licking at his heels takes her hand as out she leads him to stand on the ledge of the world, heights never known before nor such a sight seen not even in the Himalayas, a celestial city and brimming bay burnished with the morning sun. Stewart spreads his wings but not to fly, instead to swoop down 99 stories and never hit the ground….

Paul Negri is the editor of a dozen literary anthologies from Dover Publications, Inc. His stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Penn Review, Jellyfish Review, Into the Void, Vestal Review and more than 50 other publications. He lives in Clifton, New Jersey.