Long-limbed and certain of the leap she was about to make across, Lucy rolled back on her heels and took off forward. She flew through the air, more leaping than running, until her leading foot was at the edge of the precipice. And she pushed with all the strength in her tough, toned legs. And she was in the air, higher and higher until she reached the top of her arc. And then she was descending, arcing forward and downward.

Lucy only missed the solid edge of the other side by bare millimetres but miss it she did. And then she was falling.

A sort of peace engulfed Lucy. Her arms did not flail nor did her legs try to pedal her way up as reflex so often tells the brain to do, for those who fall. Futility? No. A giving over of life? No. Resignation? Yes, of a sort.

Cold, rational thought told Lucy that it was useless to fight, to struggle, to rage against something for which there is no possible solution.

But there was something in Lucy, a hard determination that told her, despite her rational knowledge of an imminent death at the bottom, that she would not, could not, die now.

And she didn’t. She was within metres of the sharp, ancient rocks that had fallen over millennia, but she did not hit, she did not die.

~ ^-^ ~

This is almost literally a cliff hanger. Why stop where I did then? It’s simple really. As things that spring into the mind often do, it ends at precisely the point at which I stopped because my brain didn’t knowhow Lucy stops. This is where my mind has to step away to consider, will this be a plausible story or a fantasy? Each sort of story requires a very different next step.

Hey, I’m not teasing. This is how things work when I write. Maybe it’s this way for other writers too. It can be start-stop with a series of disjointed ideas that do, if I’m lucky, kind of squish into each other and become a piece of writing that makes some sense, in the first draft anyway. After that its work, work, work. It’s brilliant and maddening all at the same time.