Arthur
“Just hang in there,” shouted his girlfriend Sally. Arthur wondered if she ever listened to herself.“Just hang in there!”
His forehead and forearm hurt from the scraping and bouncing through the rock slide. He grabbed the tree at the last minute. Another foot and he would be dead at the bottom. Arthur closed his eyes and dared not to look at the canyon floor.
“There’s a guy here with a crank and a rope on his Jeep,” shouted Sally. “He says he can pull you up.” “Well make it fast,” shouted Arthur.
The whole thing started when he was taking selfies with Sally on the canyon edge. They were walking backwards to the edge when he fell off. How Sally stayed on solid ground mystified him. She must have been farther from him. He lost the camera in the tumble. Just as well; Arthur wasn’t sure he wanted to remember this, anyway.
The guy with the wench pulled him up after tossing him the rope. He scraped his way on the rocks and looked like road rash when he arrived on solid ground. Sally placed gauze on his cuts. They burned like hell.
A week later, Arthur was feeling better, and the cuts were scabbing over. The
He sat at his computer and logged into his photo account. It was possible his phone uploaded the selfies before his tumble. Sure enough, he found thirteen new photos in his queue. A series of shots of him and Sally smiling with the canyon floor behind them. The last three shots were of the fall. Arthur smiling, Sally with a determined stare, and the last photo of Sally’s hand giving him a shove.
Arthur gasped. He reakoned he had some thinking to do about this relationship.
© 2018 – 2019, Michael Shawn Sommermeyer. All rights reserved.
