Reading Time: 2 Mins.
Not all good people are innocent.
Take Shari for example. They have a secret. Sometimes you find you’re in a situation where you have to choose between bad and worse.
When the story leaks, you can only hope people listen long enough to understand the context.
Shari was a fledgling packer and had only flown five times, always with their instructor. Their jetpack was secondhand, but of good quality.
They had hiked, climbed mountains, gone sky diving; altitude had never been a problem. But packing was a different game.
Packs lift you fast; your ears pop and then, suddenly, you are in the sky, arms at your sides managing the joysticks, legs straight out under you to avoid the heat from the boosters that jut out at an oblique angle off the pack.
It is fast and you are flying.
The day Shari went packing with Kingsley was one she would never forget. They had done well in their course and both were able to fly on their own. They started off at the base of Table Mountain with the summit in plain view. The goal was to get there in one shot.
Nothing too fancy and keeping out of the way of the cable cars, they would head straight up then make a 90 degree turn and head directly for the flat landing zone at the top, plain and simple.
They checked each other’s packs, took a deep breath, and lifted off.
Disaster.
Kingsley’s pack malfunctioned when he was only a foot in the air. The pack sent him into the side of the mountain at 85 mph. Shari saw the whole thing at 40 feet and rushed down to his side, lifted his arms, tried to animate him, but he did not move.
This was the climax of their story. Married for ten years, dating for five before that, and it ended here, at the base of a mountain in Cape Town, 10 000 miles away from that casting couch in L.A. where it had all started.
Shari shed a tear. People were coming.
Shari moved away from the rock wall and gave the medic space. This was it, it was goodbye. Goodbye to all of the abuse, to the scars, and to being less than so that he could be more.
The dial had been off at packcheck.
Maybe Shari was not a good person after all.
Written daily using the #vss365 word prompts on twitter, compiled weekly into a story of exactly 400 words.
#innocent #fledgling #oblique #plain #animate #climax #wall
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