It was like the time

AE Macleod

It was like the time they went hiking, all the children wanting to get a better view than the one available from the canyon viewing platform, even though the sign specifically said the escarpment was dangerous. The kids just went past the barricade and onto the sliver of earth, thin as a matchstick and took their photos and made pebbles fall from the edge, from the precise place where rain had gouged out the soil beneath the ledge and someone pretended to fall because someone always pretends to touch death—that’s just how it is. And everyone laughed. Then after, as they boarded the bus, one of the children says what part of my brain makes me want more. Isn’t it all just yearning for immortality in the end. Every day, aren’t we all like the crew boarding the Space Shuttle Challenger on the morning of January 28, 1986—alive momentarily. The next time when a group of children hears they are to go to the canyon they all spend the trip talking about how you can go right out past the edge and someone knew someone who’d done it and how they were going to do it too and now here they are, all over again, standing at the precise place where the others stood, smiling and laughing and making bunny ears and by the time there are six kids out there, it is enough to have it just give way like a paper house in a breeze, except it doesn’t, not right then.

AE MACLEOD is a Brisbane writer. Their poems appear in Meniscus, The Cormorant (Sligo) and Mending Matters Anthology. Their fiction appears in New Australian Fiction, Island and Granta.