The Fifth Annual Writer Games: The Fall

The Fall of the Aztecs - Males

District 1 Male – Chet Jackson

It's an uphill climb, down the mountain. Chet had to take innumerable snack breaks to let Venus catch up on the ascent, but their roles have reversed on the reverse trip. She's slinky like that, like a cat. Like a puma. Like a dark chocolate drizzle dripping down delicacies. She puts so much weight into each of her words that they dribble from her mouth and fall flat before him. He watches as she hugs the boulder they're meant to go around, letting the snow slick her segue to safety. Chet takes his hat - long ago removed from his sweat-sticky head - and brushes the snow aside before even attempting to cross. Each step steady and secure. And slow, Venus reminds him. "Someone's gonna be waiting with a crossbow as soon as we make it down," she says, the latest in her menu of moans about the dangers of safety precautions.

"All the more reason to take it easy. The view is beautiful," and it is, the night sky a sea swimming with stars, "and I'd like to enjoy it. Maybe your worst case scenario stake out will fall asleep waiting for us."

Venus tilts her head to this. "If they were so foolish," she looks down over the sheer, trying to spot people like ants. "The second group to see us would eat twice as well, then."

"Don't joke, I've heard family dinners mean something much different in Twelve than it does back home." Chet smirks to himself, unduly proud of the jest he repeats from the schoolchildren back home who repeat it from their parents back home.

"I don't often." Joke, that is. "It's been a day already and I've seen neither a rabbit nor a wren. All of us have to eat but all of us wont - not somewhere this sparse. For some that will be because they're too weak, others, it will be because they're too strong. To survive, people will give up everything. Are you willing to do that, Jackson?"

Chet pulls a sleeve of tree nuts from his pocket, the top of it already chewed apart by mousy teeth, and drains the remainder down his gullet. He chews with one side of his mouth and speaks with the other, "It's a good thing I don't have to."

For the first time this side of the mountain, Chet takes the lead. Venus stays on the edge. Something about her way makes it seem like she's sitting there, even though she stands straight up. She looks over the world with determination. Chet tries to catch her eye so he can flash a wink of the teeth and she can act like she's annoyed with him and things can dissipate. At earshot, he stops and turns, looking to the back of Venus. Snow scatters under the tap tap tap of his impatient boot. "To give you credit," Venus speaks to the chasm and lets the winds spread the rumor she starts to Chet, "I think you would. As soon as empty retches take your stomach, you would take even a child, even your own, and you would sate yourself with a smile. Without a care. I like that about you. It's one of the only things."

Chet lifts his foot one more time to turn around, and then it freezes. It's almost like he's fallen upwards. Venus passes him and for her, things return to normal. The Chet lagging behind her is something closer to the Chet she wishes was, but things mostly return to normal. She slows now, if she ever gets too far ahead, rather than stopping as they did, keeping him close enough to yell to, but too far to talk.

Everything is different for Chet. He thinks about how Venus thinks about eating people a bit more than probably the average person does, and thinks about how she might be right, now that he thinks about it. He doesn't even really know what this meat stick is made out of, but he bites into it anyway. He thinks of what to say to Venus next and he thinks of nothing.

Their way up and down the mountain was and is a series of zig-zags. The trundled foot prints they left last night are now the shallowest of craters, the snow wiping along the path like an eraser. From this height, the furthermost boughs of firs are tickling at their toes. Three zigs and two zags from what is more or less the bottom, a dark cloud falls over them. The parachute is pitch black and sticks out like a spot on a dog on this backdrop. Venus prickles and screws her hand around the hilt in her coat pocket. Chet bobs up and down, reaching for the package only for a gust to take it away from him and send it down to what must have once been a puddle. The corner of the cardboard box crumbles, and the package breaks the ice.