'Excavating Sniffy Bear' by D. X. Lewis

You’re terrified by mountains, but you’re soon to climb a cliff.

You’re soon to climb a cliff, harnessed to a rope above. 

Trusting someone is holding the rope above, you climb. 

You climb to smell of salty sea and sound of sliding shingle, whirling wind, whooshing waves.

You climb as seagulls circle, dive, swoop, peck your eyes, you new Prometheus.

You climb climb climb, one foot at a time, one hand, age-old strata at your nose. Time and matter compressed: sand, rock, pebbles, fossils of birds, fish, dinosaurs, plants.

Forget B.C. Forget Christ, for God’s sake. Before You, B.Y., isn’t worth a fig. Now is what matters. The only time you know.

But B.Y. must mean something, you think, cliff-clinging by fragile fingers. To the stone-frozen creatures in the rock face. To every human back to Adam, back to Eve. Without that rope, unbroken, you wouldn’t exist.

And very soon you won’t exist, if nobody is securing the upward rope.

Trusting the upward rope is secured, you haul yourself skyward, left toe tasting, right hand reaching. 

As you grope and reach and taste and stretch and touch for the top, you spot a fossil of your sister’s koala bear. The comfort bear you jettisoned in spite, forty years ago. Whose fate you never confessed. Whose disappearance broke her heart. Whose ears went bald because she sniffed their fur.

To free the fossil of the bald-eared bear, you chip into the cliff, climbing hook in right hand, left hand holding tight. Like Michelangelo, you think, releasing forms from marble.

No, don’t be pompous. Don’t reach beyond your station.

And as you reach beyond your station, releasing bear from stone, you fall, fall fall to the ground. 

Nobody is holding the rope.

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A recovering journalist, D. X. Lewis is devoting his golden years to other forms of fiction — from novels and plays to ever shorter texts. His stories, flashes and micros have been published widely online and in Bath, Fish and Oxford anthologies. In 2021 he won the Bangor 40-word-competition. His short story Crossing the Curtain was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Panorama Journal. 'Geoffrey Swaps His Cage', a prize-winning flash, was featured by Writing Magazine in April 2024. His novella-in-flash, A Life in Pieces, is available on Amazon. D.X. Lewis divides his time between London and Ferney-Voltaire, France.