“Come over,” she’d said. “I have an idea.” She always had ideas. Even now, home from another hospital stay, shoulders all knobs and angles when I hugged her. She made tea. Two old, old friends, map spread on the table between us. Black rain raked sideways across the window.
“Look here.” Her finger traced the Andes’ spine: Urubamba, Puno, Cuzco. “We four-wheel till the trail runs out, then walk.”
It didn’t sound as crazy as I knew it was. When trails ran out, she always found a way ahead, a way to add a chapter to the novel she was always going to write. At six she’d struggled from the crashed Cessna where her parents died, got away with barely a limp though both legs had been nearly severed. All her life, a fighter to her core. Took to the streets. Got up in haters’ faces. Beat booze, beat coke, wrestled cancer to a five-year draw, though she gave up a lung that time. Whupped chemo’s ass. “Hey, I look better without hair than with.”
Another surgery. Chemo’s ass fought back that time. Yet here she was, with her mug and map and latest plan.
Sunrise at Machu Picchu. “Bucket list.” Oh, by the way, eyes on the map: “Tests don’t look good.”
Air drained from the room. “How bad?”
“Ah, they cut me open, closed me up again.”
I listened to us breathing. The refrigerator switched on. A drop of water plopped from the faucet into a cup in the sink, a sound so sharp and distinct that I jumped. “No options?” I said, “clinical trials? What does the oncologist say?”
“I’m done with that fool. His story never changes.” Raising her cup toward me, a kind of toast: “Come on, girl. You know you want to.”
“And you know I’m terrified of heights.”
“Me too.” She laughed. “That’s half the point,” taking my hand, turning it palm-up. “Hmm. Nice long life-line you got there.” Then with a quick squeeze, “You tried for years to turn us into a Harlequin Romance. Don’t be telling me no!”
I closed my eyes. The narrow rocky trail. The deep, deep canyon. My stomach reeled. No guardrail, no parachute, no wings, and me with no terminal illness. Me, weaker than I’d ever suspected I could be. “How soon? I’ve got deadlines. Could we wait till Fall?”
She laughed again, then coughed, coughed again, her whole frame wracked. “For you,” when she could speak, “for you, I’ll buy a postcard.”
***
Red-streaked sky, dark rock ruins in brooding, stark relief. Machu Picchu, certainly. But sunrise? Sunset? The postcard doesn’t say. Her message: “You shoulda come with!” is no more help than I had any right to expect.
I don’t know, but I believe: She saw the sunrise. Saw the sun rise, and started down the narrow trail again, and where the steep path hairpinned left she strode on straight ahead.
Sara McAulay is the author of two novels (Knopf), a novel for young readers, and numerous works of short fiction (Black Warrior Review, California Quarterly, New American Review, Third Coast, ZYZZYVA, among others). She received an NEA Fellowship and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in prose. After many years away from writing, she has turned to poetry and flash, with work published or forthcoming in Bending Genres, Hole in the Head Review, Rise Up Review and others.
Lila Fatehi (b. Iran) is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist. She was trained in Painting at Alzahra University and in Computer Science at Tehran’s National University. She has exhibited her work in Iran, the United States and Canada. Fatehi was the recipient of the highest accolade at the 5th Biennale held by Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA.) She is a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and has been awarded numerous Ontario Arts Council grants. Fatehi uses a variety of media (painting, drawing, sculpture, sound and video) to examine the boundaries of existence by working through tumultuous subjects that often demonstrate motion and horror. In her recent work, she explores notions of interiority and embodied experience.