Summertime, and the air was still chilled. Wispy clouds drifted across the sky. She shifted the backpack, moving the strap off of the latest sore spot. Almost there, she thought, and kept her eyes down on the path in front of her. No sense in slipping and breaking something now – the top would be there when she got there.
The fingers of stone reached out of the mountain, reaching futilely for the sky. Between them, the water reflected the deep blue sky, fragments of clouds tissue thin. Still there. Always there.
The path leveled out in front of her, and then spread out across the small flat peak. Now she could look out in every direction, see the swells of land and forest below. The horizon is so much further away up here, she thought. At first, she was fascinated by things far away – the forests, the horizon, the trails of clouds. Slowly, she began to look at closer objects, looking at the path she had come up and then for the one she planned to take back down.
Then, some ways down, she saw the pool, full of blue sky with the bottom stones showing through, calling to her. Her eyes followed a trail back up from the pool to the top. Yes, it was on her path down, and she could stop there to eat and have a drink. It would be chill, but she was warm enough.
She went down carefully. There was no sense in slipping now, either. The pool was quite not as large as it had seemed from the top, but the pillars of stone rose just above her head. She put her pack down near the water’s edge and looked out to the horizon again, before digging out some food and a cup.
She knelt on a large rock at the edge with the cup in her hand, and found herself staring at the sky still reflected in the water. Could you drink the sky? She wondered and reached her flat palm out to touch the water, as if to put her hand on a cloud.
The water seeped around her hand in rivulets, winding themselves like fingers, and held on. She pulled back, and the hand followed. Tossing the cup to the side, she grabbed at the water with her other hand and pulled hard. A moment later, her hands were full of skin and hands, rather than water.
She looked at the face she hadn’t seen in so long and smiled. His mouth opened, as if to speak, but couldn’t find the words. She pulled him towards her pack and the warm clothes. “You reached your hand out to me, even while you dreamt in underwater sleep. How could I not find you?”
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This almost was a horror story. I’m still not sure if it would work better that way.
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