Surviving the Climb
My arm cut through the chilling air until it hovered over my head, then I swiftly swung the pick down past my face and hard into the ice. I flinched when the ice split open. I keep expecting to have the ground crack and to be attacked by millions of shards of glass. The attack never comes though, and as I pull myself to the next step along this steep trail, My mind can’t help but to interrupt the following program with a sequence of the ice falling away and our team being swept into a valley of broken shards of ice. The chilling visions of death have become an unwelcome pastime. At times, when my breath isn’t steady, they become too vivid. The ice reflects the sun too much, the sky too bright, the grotesque details of skin and torn fabric are too small. Every fiber, every thread too blatant, too obvious, their wrinkles too profound, their corpses fell too perfectly. My breath, I notice now, isn’t steady.