Summit

The summit is the goal, although the way is thorny and rough. The bark of spruces brushes your arms as you await the sudden ray, and beetles pock your skin as water rushes in the stream beneath the rocky ridge. It's taken you a half a century to get this far. Below the hanging bridge, there is a skeleton and broken knee, soiled jeans, torn shirt, boots caked with clay and mud, a little temple, and what looks like a scar. Yet biding your time was enough, the thud of your heart now the echo in dry blood, lips watered by the moon and the first star weeks after the drought following the flood.