This story is by Donna Harper and was part of our 2021 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
A heavy blanket of snow covered the landscape, illuminating the deep darkness of the winters night. Kate flinched as a blast of icy flakes pecked at her already chapped cheeks. Huddling deeper into the feathered down of her padded red coat, she pulled her fur-edged hood tighter. She couldn’t have hoped for a better night.
As she took another deep breath, the cold air slammed into the back of her throat and Kate stifled a hacking cough, hiding the blood in her hankie. She stopped, and looking across saw the two judges wince at the broken silence and prayed they wouldn’t disqualify her for it. By tradition this had to be done in silence. Pressing her frozen lips together she held her breath, trying to control her ragged breathing. Even so, her lungs felt raw as if each breath was laced with double-edged razors. If the Judges knew she was dying they’d never let her go. She was desperate to leave on a high. Live life for the now she thought, or suffer a fate far worse than death – the eternal crowing of Judge 1.
It had always been a battle between the two of them, but he was lazy in his practising and she beat him eight out of ten times. With his foghorn voice he would crow from dawn to dusk if he took her crown now, ensuring that no matter which hospice they sent her to she would always hear his raucous bragging.
Shivering continuously now as the piercing wind wiggled through the gaps in her layers of baggy clothing, Kate trudged through the drifts, avoiding hidden stumps and black, low-hanging branches as she wound her way upwards, forever upwards. The item she dragged felt heavier than usual and left a noticeable trail, but as she climbed the mountain she knew her tracks would be deeply buried by the incoming storm.
If Judge 1 thought she’d be demoralised enough to make a mistake after he manipulated the others to make Kate wait until last, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Now she knew exactly what she had to do. The mountain’s danger was meaningless, for her at least, so she could afford to take risks. Her practised steps kept her inches from hidden hidey-holes where slippery danger lurked, waiting with the patience of Saints to toss her over the side, headlong to the stoney valley below. Closing her snow-blinded eyes briefly, Kate prayed the forecasters were right and the deluge wouldn’t happen yet. Not now. Not this winter night of all winter nights, for it would be her last, she felt it in her bones and freshly laid snow would simply slow her down.
As her eyes fluttered open Kate coughed again. The noise was explosive in the muted quiet of the night. She looked sideways at the two judges to gauge their reaction. Judge 1’s permanent frown had deepened, making it look like his forehead had been folded too many times when he was still in the womb. He had coveted her crown for the past three years, insisting that she step down as age crept upon her. She would not. There was nothing in their constitution that said she had to give up her crown, and she certainly wasn’t going to do it willingly – until now.
Now she had no choice, but he didn’t know that. Judge 2, going by the pressing-down motion of his long, slender hands was attempting to placate Judge 1. After a minute of heated discussion the judges glanced down to where they knew eager watchers waited. Not hearing any roar of refusal from below they finally relented, nodding for Kate to continue.
With no moon to guide her and soft snow falling heavier now, it became increasingly difficult to see the way ahead. Kate turned this way and that on instinct, trudging forever upwards. It was no good relying on familiar landmark trees or recognisable outcrops as this ghostly landscape was completely alien to what she knew. It was for that reason she had secretly practised blind-folded.
Never knowing from which angle the judges would instruct her to ascend, as was their right, she often practised different routes. This one was the most treacherous and, to her mind the most obvious. Aside from the minefield of small bushes that sprung up along the richer soil on this side of the mountain each year, there were many obscured outcrops lurking under this comprehensive blanket, all looking as innocent as the true way. But she had learnt them all – she hoped.
Her hands shook continuously now so she couldn’t feel them or the thin cord tied tightly to each side of her burden, under the thin layer of her neoprene gloves. She glanced back to check that she was still hauling it and smiled. The judges, who usually watched from a distance had wandered closer, fearful themselves tonight of what they could not see. They trusted her, it seemed, not the watchers or their own eyes.
The graveyard of skeletal trees thinned out as she reached her destination revealing a wide, open space. With nothing to catch it, snow dusted her like a coating of finely powdered icing sugar. Kate stepped lightly, carefully, her studded boots leaving deep elongated tracks that the snow endeavoured to fill. Crouching down low, so her bum scraped the surface of the thickening snow, Kate squinted. What scant light there was, refracted off the pristine white surface showing up anomalies like her tracks, as a myriad of blurry shadows, grey upon grey.
Suddenly she spotted a slight indentation on an almost glassy, flat mound and her right arm shot out in silent warning. The judges froze, standing rigid in the falling snow. One more stride and they would have stepped onto a smooth outcrop known as Moss Slide and would have gone crashing down over the edge. Over the years many had lost their lives that way, judges included. Plumes of steaming breath cloaked the judges like a frenzied mist as they sighed in nervous relief. They clung together, looking nervously over to Kate whose bony finger pointed there, and there, showing them where to step safely. They nodded in stony silence and complied. The watchers who’d seen this interplay through the binoculars everyone in the mountainous region carried, sighed as one, their low release of breath whipped away on the wind, never to be heard.
The snow was deep and crusted on the crest. Kate stopped to catch her breath while she rubbed her hands vigorously, desperate to warm them. The bitter wind whistled it’s eerie song as it battered her frosted face. It licked insistently at the exposed surface of her streaming eyes and froze droplets of moisture around her nasal passages. As she swiped at them with the back of her hand the wind dropped and larger, heavier snowflakes began to fall. The storm was approaching fast.
Kate looped the thin cord around both hands, gripping it tight enough to cut off the blood supply. Almost. She couldn’t risk it being jarred from her grasp. Not tonight. Gauging her run-off point, she picked up the sledge and howling with laughter took a running jump and kicked off, flattening herself as much as she could against its slim wooden bed. The bumpy, chaotic ride down the almost vertical mountainside was the most exhilarating she’d ever had. Kate’s speed boosted the Arctic wind and it whipped at her hood, finally snapping it off, whisking it away like a red admiral butterfly in a vortex. But the tightly-woven scarf tied beneath her chin protected her ears from the worst of the wind’s ferocious nip.
The wide runners of the sledge, painstakingly coated with six thin layers of used candle-wax, slid lickety-split so they glided effortlessly over the snow. Kate’s adrenaline pumped to the max as she leant left, right, back, using muscles she’d honed all year to pull on the guide cord, dodging unrecognisable obstacles that whizzed past in a blur. Gliding high through the thin air off dense ramps of coarse grass she could not see, Kate landed with hardly a thump as her sledge touched down. The last 500 yards were the worst, with narrow gaps threading between dense ghost-brambles and holly trees that skirted the mountain’s wide base, making navigating them at speed perilous to life and limb.
Smashing into the masses of hay bales, where mountain slope gave way to village perimeter, Kate sailed off her sledge, landing in the cushioned mound of sheepskins kept for this purpose. She retched, coughing reddened ice into her hankie. Hardly sparing it a glance, she sighed. The risk had been worth it. She’d rather live for this one moment of exhilaration than suffer the fate worse than death she’d have had to endure if she’d lost. She pocketed her hankie milliseconds before being hoisted shoulder high and hailed around the village as the fastest granny in town.
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