The Precipice

Editorial Content Warning: This story contains violent imagery and mentions of suicide.

 

I suppose it’s the classic making of a murderer. A small desire emerges, in the corner of your mind. Then it grows, festers, like a virus, feeding on and destroying the rest of you. Until all you are is that one desire.

For me, it was the precipice. Steep cliffs, ledges, even staircases. I couldn’t look at a person near a precipice without the undeniable urge to push and catapult them downward, down, down, down, into whatever abyss lurked below. Yet, I denied it. Because isn’t that what life is? A series of denials, a quest to curb one’s unsavory desires, to fit into the decrepit cage of a moral society.

As I sat in the food court of the Moordale Mall, I scanned the premises for temptation, so as to avoid it. Nothing but an ungodly amount of children running around the dining area, searching for adventure or their mommies or strangers who’d give them candy, whatever it was children searched for. I must have been a child once, but the memory of it eluded me. And I eluded it.

A group of three young delinquents bounced from table to table. Each time they arrived at a new location, the smallest boy declared that they’d reached Greenland or Japan or Russia. Maybe I should have joined them, escaped my tedious, dissatisfied self. But I was already too old and heartless.

The lackluster salad on my tray quenched nothing. The green spinach leaves wilted against the bowl like dead bodies crumpling. The slippery tomatoes avoided the stabbing of my fork at all costs.

If I were a child I could have acted on my urges, pushed people off precipices, and it would simply have been called good fun, an innocent mistake, a guiltless error.

“Finally, I’ve been looking all over for you,” a voice said.

“Here I am.”

“You look tired. Do you need cover up?” she flattened her skirt and sat down at the table. “I can’t understand how a young and spritely 20-year-old like yourself can have such incredible under eye bags. Really, how do you do it?”

“I lie awake all night contemplating the paradox.”

Angela had a knack for quickly becoming the most dislikable person in a room. Blonde silky hair, blemish-free skin, thin as a sheet of paper—and just as blank. If the immaculate appearance didn’t tick you off, she’d open her mouth, and that would do it. I liked her because I never had to feel sympathy for her.

“At least pretend you’re excited. Your first date-party, all thanks to my matchmaking magic,” she unlocked her phone and scrolled with intention. “How much did you bring? I need to know if we’re talking luxury or fast fashion.”

“I brought a twenty. Brian disgusts me and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of putting effort into this.”

“Everyone disgusts you. You’re a hardened old soul with nothing to live for, aren’t you?” She didn’t look up from her phone. I couldn’t tell whether she was being cruel or playful. “At least you’re eating salad. Thinness is chic. Parisian, you know.”

We sifted through aisles of sparkly, offensive garments. Angela tried on everything, and looked very pleased with herself, sliding her hands down her slim waist in contented approval. I bought the first thick, long-sleeved black garb I could find. The fabric draped over me monstrously, hiding whatever figure I might have had, and I marveled at how plain and homely I looked.

Though the mall excursion was all-around unpleasant, the worst part of it was undoubtedly the stairway. It was one of those swirling, elegant, glass statement stairways smack dab in the middle of the open two-story arena.

We stood at the top of the precipice, as Angela scanned her checklist, making sure we didn’t forget anything. Perfume oozed out of a boutique behind us, smothering me in decadence. Lavender and vanilla wafted around me, encircling me, teasing my nose, daring me to inhale it. I did and became depraved soon after, slipping into a fantasy I knew too well.

A mall-goer swerved around us, headed for the precipice. A man, tall and bulky, like a sandwich you don’t know how to bite into, with an absurdly tiny head topped with a baseball cap. He was exactly the kind I went for, strong but unsuspecting, so the shove downward was even sweeter. A small girl like myself, triumphing over a large body that could dominate her in all situations. All, but one.

I reached my hand through the thick vanilla aroma and it came into contact with a jean jacket, rough and durable. Nerve and unrelenting desire crescendoed, and I pushed. Gravity swooped in to finish the job.

What followed was cataclysmic, riveting, and I found myself wishing I’d brought popcorn. A body became nothing more than a boulder finally rolling off a cliff, crashing down slowly and violently. The bouldered body rolled, it twirled, it danced, and I fell in love. As it crashed into the railing, propelled into the opposite railing, I bit my lip, repressing a smile, but my eyes betrayed me, twinkling with wonder.

But the aroma thinned and the fantasy evaporated. The bulky body made its way down the stairway, unscathed, and I was unsatisfied, repressed, stifled. The expanse of white, brightly lit mall became unbearable and I searched for an exit.

*****

The date-party was duller than I imagined, which was saying a lot. The dark, hazy frat house smelled of sweat and alcohol and cheap perfume. People danced drunkenly, grinding on one another aggressively, as if the world were about to end. I had been asked about my major a dozen times, and each time I tried to throw out something new. At first it was English, the girl by the bar who read books. Then it became sociology. After that it was aerospace engineering, for feminist reasons. Then religious studies. I watched crinkled beer cans accumulate on the floor, and wondered if the comedic value of slipping on a beer can was akin to a banana peel.

Not associated with Greek life, I was only invited because Kappa Kappa Angela had implored the last dateless straggler of Phi Beta Mu to ask me, whom she allegedly described as short, dark-haired, and passionately indifferent. I acquiesced, because I strived to take part in a social activity at least once a month.

“Rebecca, dance with me…,” sloppy straggler Brian sauntered over to the alcohol area and took my hand. Sweat beads were scattered across his acne-ridden forehead. If I had a canoe I might have been able to sail across it.

“That’s a nice offer, but no thanks.”

“What?” he struggled to make out my words, overpowered by loud rap music and his inability to comprehend rejection.

“I just got my period,” I shouted over the music.

Brian squinted at me, trying to unblur my face in his alcoholic daze.

“My grandmother died.” I tried again.

He waved understandingly and winked, which came off as more of a tick, as sweat seeped down his forehead and onto his eyelids. “I’ll be back later.”

After a tedious period of watching bodies clash violently and gruesomely, I went out into the backyard, taking the smoke break I made a habit of, in case I should want to take up smoking.

The frat house patio was even darker than the interior, with fewer bodies, but a more intimate assortment. I headed towards the fence, a steep boundary overlooking the black ocean. A precipice if I’d ever seen one.

My college town’s western border was the water, and tall, rocky cliffs kept us barricaded within the square mile of sociality. But temptation was always just a glance away. Naturally, people fell off these cliffs, once every few years. Drunk and disorderly, they were called. Suicidal, they were sometimes labeled. An avoidable tragedy, but never foul play. The perfect conditions for a fatal mistake.

Don’t get me wrong. I fantasized, but I never planned. I imagined, but I never realized. There existed between my urges and my actions a thin line that I never crossed. A balance beam that I carefully tread upon. Until tonight.

“Ruh-becca,” the chirp was louder and shriller than ever before. “Disgusted already?” A tipsy Angela clacked over toward me, a red cup in each hand.

“Brian is sweating buckets.” I lamented.

“It’s because you’re sweat-inducingly beautiful. Now drink.”

I obliged and took the cup because it seemed more trouble than it was worth to argue.

“Do you ever wonder… I mean, like, think about jumping, or falling?” I rested my elbows on the white picket fence, staring dreamily into the black abyss, wondering how many people it had swallowed up.

“Is drunk Rebecca suicidal?” she giggled.

“No.”

Her voice became a whisper, “I think Jeremy wants me to be his girlfriend, for real. He’s all lovey-dovey, he keeps tucking my hair behind my ear, and kissing my forehead. Who even said my forehead wanted to be kissed? My foundation’s probably coating his lips.” Her life was a fairytale that kept on repeating itself and she was always the princess. “Who knew a date-party could be so transformative?”

I nodded and told her I wanted to push a person off the bluff and watch them fall to their dark death.

“You’re hilarious. Now come back in and discreetly watch me and Jeremy, and tell me what you think.”

“Of course,” I said duly. “I’ll be there in a sec, I have to finish my cigarette.” I held my empty fingers up against my lips. As per usual, I was fulfilled only through fantasy. She turned around and I limply tossed my red cup at her. It landed a few feet from the subject, nondescript liquid oozing out, like blood on the sidewalk.

“Smoking kills,” she glanced back, blowing me a kiss as she slipped through the sliding door, disappearing into the fraternal haze.

Boredom kills, I thought, wishing I had chosen a different social activity. People watching normally had its perks, but the party consisted less of people than a mass blob of student soup. I wanted to extract and separate each body, using the tweezers from Operation.

“I’m drunk and I love you,” a soft voice snuck up behind me.

“Get lost,” I said. A hand caressed my cheek and pulled a strand of my straightened hair behind my ear.

“You’re too pretty to be so surly.” He wrapped his arms around my waist.

“I’m not that pretty.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“Angela thinks you’re going to ask her to go steady tonight. You should probably take her to a diner, drink from the same milkshake, and stare into each other’s eyes, marveling at how attractive the other is.”

I turned around, and stared solemnly at the face in front of me. Dark eyes, black like the ocean. Spirals of curly blond hair, like my favorite pasta. I inhaled softly, ingesting the sweet scent of betrayal, alcoholic and citrusy.

“I don’t see Angela,” Jeremy kissed my forehead lightly, like I was a delicate bug he was saving from drowning. He glanced back at the sliding door slowly, discreetly, not a spiral of his hair displaced. A smile spread across his face, his thin lips tightly bound, sealing away our secret. He was playing a dangerous game, and he was winning.

I, on the other hand, was merely replacing one unsavory desire with another. Sure it was a rush to fool around a few feet from the deceived, but the real rush I craved was unattainable, illicit, deadly.

The problem was that hooking up with Jeremy made Angela an undeniably more sympathetic character—the unknowingly spurned lover. While she was consistently self-centered and cruel, I began to see these traits as layers, moments of rage, jealousy, and sorrow, that sprinkled her effortless existence with complexity. Meanwhile, I was becoming a cliché. I wasn’t sure who the protagonist of the story was anymore. Though I liked to think of myself as an anti-hero, the heroism of resisting violent urges to push people down stairways didn’t seem all that heroic as Jeremy fiddled with the buttons on my blouse each week.

I didn’t know who Jeremy planned to go home with that night, but as we conversed, tangled up against the fence, I wondered how much force it would take to push him completely over the barrier and down into the abyss. Probably a substantial amount.

I didn’t like the idea of using force—partially because I was weak and could hardly carry a grocery basket around the market—but mainly because there was something magical about the forceless fall. Someone standing on a ledge, blissfully at ease, waiting for my long index finger to tap their shoulder just a little too hard, a little too fast, a little too unexpectedly.

“It’s you,” Jeremy said softly into my ear. He told me I was the one he wanted. I said great. But the boy was fickle, and his grand declarations were bubbles floating up into the air, popping and disintegrating moments later.

Sounds of shuffling disturbed the quiet frat house patio, and two figures emerged behind us.

“Brian was looking for you, he was really concerned,” Angela flung the sweaty boy toward me. “I see you’ve been keeping Jeremy company. Let’s trade, shall we?”

“Let’s all go skinny dipping,” Jeremy said without missing a beat. I suppose he figured that getting naked was an easy fix to any problem. Brian sipped his beer placidly in agreement. Angela stared at me with a sour, suspicious face. I was on the precipice of an unpleasant encounter, one I did not want to push.

She handed me another red cup, filled to the brim with brown liquid, and I downed it, letting the alcohol rip through my system like a tsunami.

It was an odd thing, to be surrounded by three distinct people, each of whom you wouldn’t be opposed to pushing off a cliff and watching his or her body plummet from jagged rock to jagged rock until they hit the bottom, with a soft, distant, echoing thud. I felt alone, but excited and hopeful.

*****

We left the frat house, four varyingly drunk college seniors, wandering the streets, searching for access to the beach, so we could strip and get better acquainted with the ocean.

“Bri, don’t you love Rebecca’s dress?” Angela said.

Brian shrugged, his inebriation was wearing off. “It’s nice, very black.”

“We surveyed the mall for hours this morning. It’s Forever 21 chic,” she smiled, her teeth hauntingly white, “even though baby Becca’s only 20.”

There was no one else on the streets, save for a few blurry bodies whizzing by on skateboards, which was unusual. It must have been late. I didn’t care. I was neutral, void, floating through the dark night like a hawk. I scanned the pastel, oceanside houses, watching the tired silhouettes in the lit windows.

I wondered, briefly, how many people there were on this earth that I wouldn’t push down the stairs or off a cliff, if the perfect opportunity presented itself. Family was a nonstarter for obvious reasons, loyalty and all, and the fact that I’d have been number one on the suspect list. There were some incidents in my childhood that left people believing I might be an at-risk case. Nothing serious, just a few fires, accidents, innocent mistakes, guiltless errors.

But it all really started with Trevor, so tall and lanky the crown of his head seemed to touch the heavens. High school sweethearts. Then we went to college, and he buzzed his hair and lacerated my heart, what little what was left of it, and I began wondering what it’d be like to watch him fall to a bloody death. To push him to that death. He was always facing me in these fantasies, and I savored that sweet, brief moment of realization, when his blue eyes widened and welled with terror and betrayal, before they disappeared forever.

The urge to push began to percolate, seeping across my existence, sticky like syrup, and soon the whole world was a precipice. The rage was ruptured, the sadism was severed, but the desire remained. The fantasies became more frequent, but I rarely knew the victims, and they seldom faced me when I tapped their shoulders and sent them teetering downwards.

“I found stairs,” Jeremy said, pointing to a small, dark pathway between two run-down houses. I didn’t know how long we’d been walking, but my feet were starting to hurt, trapped in the black kitten heels Angela had forced me to wear.

I rarely went to these beach access stairways, for obvious reasons. As the stairs came into view, I saw the contraption in its full glory. Long, wooden, rickety, covered in obscene graffiti, framed by tall, looming palm trees on each side. Though it lacked the elegance of the mall’s spiral specimen, the wooden steps beckoned you, tempted you, like the boy in the leather jacket with the motorcycle, who your parents despised. My heart began to race.

“Goddamn high tide,” Angela sighed.

“Spooky,” Brian echoed.

Approximately three stories of stairway stared back at us. They were supposed to lead to sand, but the nighttime tide brought the black ocean halfway up them. The waves were like inky hands reaching out to us, then pulling back. Moonlight speckled the water with glints and sparkles, like photographers flashing their cameras to capture the moment.

“You guys are chicken shit,” Jeremy puffed out his chest, feet planted firmly on the top stair. He and Angela locked hands, united by the bonds of bravery amidst all the chicken shit. “Hey look, someone else is doing it too,” he pointed to an obscure object floating nearby.

“Dude,” Brian said.

“Jeremy. Jeremy,” Angela shook his shoulders.

As we collectively squinted, the obscure object came into focus. What looked like a body, floating at the base of the cliff, swaying with the tide. It didn’t look like it had entered the water voluntarily.

“Jeremy, do something,” Angela said.

“I’ll call someone… the police.”

“We don’t know how long it’s been in there, this is life and death,” she said urgently, as if she was performing a dramatic scene she’d already watched play out.

“You want me to swim to it?” his chest deflated and his body stiffened.

“Are you chicken shit?” I said from behind him, watching his spiral hair tremble. I was behind them all, seeing the scene unfold, but close enough to reach out and touch either one of them. Angela’s silky silver dress, Jeremy’s thin blue button-down, Brian’s sweat soaked tank top. My fingers tingled from frozenness and possibility.

The breeze began to whip our shivering bodies. The palm trees convulsed. The waves got louder and meaner, hitting the wooden stairs viciously every few seconds. It seemed, within moments, the night had become violent, and we were no longer welcome in it.

“I mean, it looks like it’s already… you know,” Jeremy said.

“Dead, putrefied, rotting, a corpse?” I suggested.

“Rebecca, what the hell?” Angela turned around to send me a sharp glare. I stared back in a daze. Her facial features looked like they had been resized and rearranged, her eyes were tiny bullet holes, and her lips stretched like putty. Angela looked back at her beloved and told him he absolutely had to go in the water, and did he want to be a hero or a bystander, which was essentially a villain.

“What about Brian? Brian, you should go, you’ve been working out, you should go.” Jeremy stammered, his body shaking from the cold.

“Brian is a half-wit,” Angela said.

“Fuck you, I got a 32 on my ACT.” Brian looked bewildered, though that might have been his normal state. He made to speak again, before realizing this was an argument he didn’t want to win, and quickly slipped back into his pseudo-alcoholic stupor.

“Wow, it’s refreshing to hear someone speak so candidly about peaking in high school,” Angela smirked. I watched her hand squeeze Jeremy’s for dear life, while his dangled loosely in hers.

I reveled in the most glorious night I’d had in a while. Calamity, drama, distrust. It was all there in abundance. Maybe it’d even wreck my friendship with Angela, if I were lucky. Though it was hard to focus on the disaster in front of me, with death looming so nearby.

The wind swirled my hair around my head, like a halo, like Medusa’s snakes. I felt powerful and cold and giddy and childlike. It felt like that night at Grandma’s house, after fifth grade graduation. Outside on the deck, the wind tickling my arms, igniting me.

“I’m calling campus security, I just have to find the number.”

“What’s campus security going to do?”

I watched them argue, but the only thing I could think of was the wind and how it was daring us to dance.

When I was a child I took lessons, ballet. But I wasn’t graceful and it didn’t really feel like dancing. It felt robotic, stale spins and twirls and points and gestures. True dancing was something else, it was grim, violent, natural, jagged. It was falling.

People weren’t meant to live in states of dull repression, longing, yearning. That wasn’t living, that was waiting. I wanted to live, to act, to push. There was already one body adorning the black sea, what harm would there be in adding a few more? Watching that floating corpse drift lifelessly across my existence was the omen I’d been waiting for, and omens weren’t to be trifled with.

It wasn’t murder if it was an accident, a light tap on the shoulder, a gentle shove in the dead of night. Death had already penetrated our evening, creating an outline, and I was merely filling it in. The alcohol was blurring my vision but allowing me to finally see clearly.

“I didn’t know I was dating a coward,” Angela said, still trying to make a hero out of her prized pig.

“Dating?”

I looked on at the calm before the storm, the stillness before the dance, the life before the death. Their lives flashed before my eyes—inebriated, hedonistic existences—and I was humbled by the meaning, the poetry, the beauty I was about to infuse into each of them.

The moment was pristine, and I almost didn’t want to ruin it. Moonlight shone down on us like a spotlight, waiting for the performance to commence. I was the director, and it was nearly time to call action.

Except for me, “you’re all cowards,” I said softly, raising my arms and pushing on the fabric in front of me, hard, harder than I thought I would have to. Brian’s body went first, leaving my hand damp and sticky. Jeremy and Angela went next, together, Romeo and Juliet nudged by a higher power. Angela’s thin body collapsed easily, a house of cards toppled by the touch of my palm.

The dance began, but somehow I was dancing too. Angela had grabbed my wrist before I’d had time to pull it away. I hadn’t accounted for reflex.

We tumbled down the jagged wooden stairs, together, four bodies, dancing to the beat of our own destruction. The black watery abyss below was waiting for us. Moonlight ricocheted from body to body, highlighting our spins, our twirls, our recital. I felt all the knots untying within me, as I became the subject of my fantasies, unsuspectingly hurled downward, one of four bodies grazing against one another brutally. I thought I wanted to push, to watch the fall, but really I wanted to be a part of it.