Jeff was having a pretty okay day. He’d woken up late, gotten some sun, hung out with some of his friends. The only problem was that he was on day five of digesting his rat, and he was starting to feel it. Jeff had many virtues, he liked to think, but when it came to food he could hardly be bothered. His friends talked about food all the time. Fucking chipmunks and frogs, salt, fucking herb rubs. It’s just rat, he kept thinking. I mean, I’ll eat it, I’ve got to live, but I just can’t get worked up about rat. 

It was time to go rustle up some rat. This feels like a good day, he thought to himself, almost a command. I have a feeling things are going to go my way.

***

“I don’t think we should go this way, Dale,” Abigail warned. “You saw the sign, right?”

Dale laughed in precisely the way he always laughed, a laugh he had practiced in front of the mirror for hours when he was fifteen. Abigail hadn’t noticed it the first five years of their marriage. She wished more than anything that she could unnotice it.

“Dearest,” he replied, “the sign isn’t a warning. It’s an encouragement. It’s not saying that you should turn back, just that you should feel more alive.”

“But what if a rock falls on one of us?”

“Exactly,” Dale answered, his eyes agleam. “Don’t let go of that thought, Abigail. Treasure it. Tattoo it on your hand when we get home, so that you never forget it. What if a rock falls on us should be on our family crest. Only under the specter of destructive potential energy are we ever truly alive.”

“Okay, but the main hike is back the other way. There’s a view of the lake and everything.” Abigail stopped to pick a rock out of her heels. She always wore a full-length dress when she hiked, because that’s what made her feel alive. She was, without fail, a triple Pisces. Also because she might run into Mark-Paul Gosselaar. One never knew.

Dale watched Abigail struggle to balance on one foot without offering to help. She was as beautiful as the day they met, her windblown brown hair flowing as she wobbled gracelessly. Wearing heels out in rattlesnake country? That’s just irresponsible, he decided, wondering how he could provide her with the tools to come to this conclusion herself, rather than just tell her. 

“I’m still worried,” she murmured as the trail climbed up the edge of the mountainside, the white noise of the wind and the hiss of thousands of snakes drowning out her fears. The pines were gnarled and they kicked up pebbles from the sunbleached silt with each step. Meanwhile, Dale was equally pensive. I envy her, he thought. No rock has ever fallen on a person. She is unaware, and thus her senses are alert; I, burdened by my knowledge, can only live in a shadow world. Perhaps he should have spent less time reading, he thought, and more time doing drugs. Or getting into improv. But then he never would have met his beautiful, clumsy wife. Happiness has its price, he decided.

By the time the shadow was beginning to blot out the sun, it was too late; but Dale was left unawares nonetheless. To this day the investigators remain stumped as to where it came from, but to Dale, it could have been a cloud passing overhead, four-thirty in the afternoon, a windswept moment. Instead, simultaneity: the crumbling of the pebbles on the ledge, Abigail’s fall, the shadow growing larger and larger. It all led to something like a sensory overload, where time both sped up and slowed to a crawl, an eternity and an instant, unmeasurable by human comprehension. Before he knew it, his intestines were on the outside.

As she swung in the breeze, white-knuckling the ledge below, Dale couldn’t help but remember the scene from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when they greedily tried to take the Holy Grail past the seal for their own benefit before the earth shook and a gaping maw opened to pull them deep into the mantle below. Abigail was suddenly Elsa, hanging on just centimeters away from the grail, breathlessly whispering I can….almost….reach it! Hallucinations are an unfortunate byproduct of bodily mutilation.

Only Abigail knew the reality of the situation, and as always with Dale, she was left trying to explain that both the sudden appearance of a gigantic ACME™ brand cartoon boulder out from the sky and a cobra inexplicably waiting for his prey to end up in this exact situation was a likely outcome of his behavior. Dale was always tempting fate–the speed limit, the hot sauce brand with the big fat “X” on it–and nothing she had tried up to this point seemed to make any difference whatsoever.

Dale thought of eternal life and the knight, and he remembered how Indiana Jones got out of the situation at the end of the movie. He began to speak, words that made sense in his mind but emerged as indistinguishable mumbling from all the blood coalescing in his throat.

Junior…

Junior…

Face to face with the poisonous snake, Abigail shouted back WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? LIFT ME UP DALE YOU JACKASS! DALE! DALE!! JESUS CHRIST!! DALE!!

Their words reverberated in the canyon below, once again, past one another, swirling and swirling like a telephone set off the receiver, words broadcast into the air to find the other line vacant.

It was typical, for these two. Neither seemed to understand. Neither asked better questions. 

***

Jeff woke up from a pretty good nap in his den. Okay, enough procrastination. Rat time. He looked out into the daylight. Wait. Wait wait. Was that… flesh? Just hanging right there, three feet away? Living flesh?

It’s gonna be real hard to go back to rat after this, Jeff realized as he unhinged his jaw. 

***

When the sun returned the reddened clay marked a spot that almost perfectly outlined the shadow of the boulder during its fall, as if nature was sending both a warning and a memory of what could be, or what was–whichever came first. They unspooled the yellow tape and one asked the other about the due date, pausing only to hammer another DANGER sign next to the pathway leading away from the ledge. A laugh, and soon they were back in the car. They loved talking. They always loved to talk.