Chapter 15: Cliffhanger




     "Jeez FM, how'd you get down there?" I gasp peering over the edge of the most protruding of the humpback rocks.

"Slipped off," she marvels, barely visible leaning into the massif from a narrow ledge. "But hey, I stuck the landing."

"Very funny!" I simper shimmying closer to the void. "Can you reach my hand?"

"Just fingertips," she hisses as sparks shoot between my right hand and her left. "Go get a branch!"

"Can't chance it," I decide, finally asserting some authority. "I'm taking down the sheet."

"Not before you count the damned bugs you're not!"



     There were twenty-two gnats, fifteen mosquitoes, nine mayflies, seven small moths, three blowflies, two june beetles, and, the piece de resistance, a gangly cranefly on the sheet suspended between branches on the back side of the rock outcropping. That was a decent haul for about thirty minutes of darkness, but we expected many more at the blacklight down by the creek. Freida-Mae would have to disclose and account for the time difference of collection in the final report, but that was neither here nor there at this particular moment.

     It was a strange place to find myself in: A twenty-year-old college junior about to try to save a beautiful Lebanese woman from falling off a mountainside. Fortunately, I'd already learned from becoming a runner that I could suppress discomfort when necessary in order to go the distance. 



     "It was a good haul, but now let's get you up from there," I call down, dangling the knotted sheet and sitting back with the heels of my hiking boots wedged into two small crevices.

"Pull," she shouts and I lean away with all of my two-hundred pounds.

"Did it!" she exclaims scrambling up over the lip as I tumble back onto the crag.

"You nearly did do it," I laugh, standing up just in time to catch her leaping hug.




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