Pupil Feature: Conal Scullion - Short Story
The Cliff
The cliff face was a gargantuan block of freezing, unmovable stone, engraved into the almost vertical, mud-encrusted mountain. It was circled by thousands of pine-green nails, like enormous pins, tarrying to rip through my bony, splintered flesh. I glanced over the splintered edge and glimpsed a great, sloping cacophony of dusty crevices and misty vertical pits, painting wild, dancing shadows on to the pearly white hills. I scanned the cottony white fields and my heart skipped a beat as I spotted a slit between two misshapen, translucent brothers. The clouds split and drifted apart. The slit stretched into a crack, the crack widened into a valley and my dark pupils deflated as my eyes locked on to the stunning vista below me. It was a forest, filled with tangles of branches and knots of vine. My hand started to leak sticky, hot tears of sweat, my heart started drumming like a bodhran, my body started to rumble like a mobile phone set to ‘vibrate’. I couldn’t wait to start.
My rough, torn fingertips dipped into the scaly leather purse at my waist. The stretched wallet was dusted with chalk along its sides. A mound of chalk filled the pouch and clung to my fingers as I reached inside. The dark inside had three craters, the swirled ridges of the pits printed by the ends of my bony fingers. I ed a gap on the sandy wall to lock my spidery digits in to, like a rat’s hairy jaw, and I cautiously manoeuvred one of my slender legs onto an uneven knob of quartz. I carefully lifted my other skinny limbs to the face and I lifted myself off the concrete. I started my ascent, a quest to defeat this colossus of a surface. I fitted my crusty hands into slot after stuffy slot and thrust myself up from nub to crumbly nub, escalating ever higher. The mountain’s crust was a rough shade of orange, baked into the firm inside. It felt rough, but firm. The distant ground, far below me now, was dotted with patches of evergreen through the brushstrokes of pine. At the horizon I could distinguish urban orbs of radiance. I shifted my gaze to the heavens and I could make out an endless blue, censored by the pearly-white fluff. I looked down again to the everlasting abyss below me. I took in the view and realised how astonishingly distant the coarse, muddy earth was below me. My heart rate shot, my veins started throbbing, my hands were buzzing. I was getting the adrenaline.
I clambered across the dirty polygonal cliff, my fingers scooping white sand from the pendulous, stressed sack at my abdomen. I was completely alert, browsing the face constantly for support. I spotted a riff. I escalated to the thin fracture where I cemented my moist, sweat- drained body to the charred stone. I examined my surroundings as my ribcage rose up and down. The horizon was slightly curved, a sign of how incredibly far up the face I was. It was a long way to fall.
I caught the Fear.