Crossing Hell

We sat just this side of the chasm, engine idling.

I don’t think we should risk it, Cy, said the death seat.

Silence.

Cy knocked the gear shift into neutral while he sat and thought.

I peered out the window.

Six inches from the steaming car door was the edge… neatly piled into a folded line of sand. Beyond that, a few weed heads… a buzzing biter or two… and a huge volume of space, enough to fill a bottomless valley of air.

Before us sat the berm of sand the steam shovels had heaped, hand upon steel hand, to bridge the gap. Small rocks skivvied down the sides of the tawny wedge, flattened on top for future paving. There was no road, no median or painted lines or fences to keep us from disaster. It was more than a hundred feet down, straight down without stop.

Cy puckered his mouth pensively.

It’s almost a hundred miles to go around, Marg, he said. I got this crazy spinning in my stomach, as if i was actually entertaining the idea that… as if he was really saying…

No, Cy, said my granny. We’ve got Anan in the car.

It’ll be alright, said Grampa absently, as he clicked the car into Drive… and started rolling forward…

I can still remember the crunching as we inched, sky upon sky on either side, over the levelled top. The ‘road’ was barely wide enough to accommodate one small car, never mind my Grampa’s luxury sedan. It sank once and the car lurched… it sank twice and he gunned it from the sliding sideways rolling, up onto the gravelled road beyond; where i lifted my head from little girl arms and everyone breathed again and we were almost merry but too frightened to talk about how close we had come… until we came to the sign, worked in large, shouting black words:

Road Closed.

Well Granny couldn’t look at me and Grampa sat and looked at his hands, and i tried not to whimper as he put the car in reverse….

and backed his way over the berm, to the other side. With speed.

And this time… we only slipped once.