by lainy carslaw
Nine women sit around an outdoor patio table, thousands of miles from their homes. To their right, the Alps stretch up into a dimming sky. The sun has disappeared behind their peaks but darkness has not yet taken over this place that never feels quite dark.
It is not late, but a giddy exhaustion has taken over their bodies. They laugh at nothing and everything. They re-laugh at stories told five minutes ago—a trip to Iceland gone wrong, a sash won by a bull to be worn on a twenty-first birthday, a Facebook Group that must be joined called Bathtubs in Meadows.
Years worth of stories told in one night.
They pass them to each other like fragile gifts silently asking, Can I trust you with this?
The women sip their white wine. They are drunk, not on their quarter-full glasses but on this buzz of connection humming between them.
They all lead complicated, difficult, sometimes painful lives. They have chosen to come here on the chance those things might not find them, tucked like specks of dust in the vastness of these mountains.
The waiter comes, refills glasses, offers blankets for their laps. His gift of warmth, an incredible act of generosity.
The next day, one of these women will sit on a bench outside a train station. Her hiking boots lay beside her tired feet, sore after eight miles of exploring the natural abundance that graces this place.
She longs to recapture last night with the power of her pen—not just the laughter but the strength of these women, their resilience. One of them, a caretaker to a thirty-year old son left paralyzed by a motorcycle accident. Another, a doctor from South Africa, still not over all the unimaginable losses she witnessed during Covid. One had escaped an arranged marriage, another recently euthanized her beloved husband. Three of them betrayed by a partner, all of them betrayed by something.
She, herself, tries not to think of her family in peril, the inevitable conflicts that wait for her back home.
That afternoon they had walked to Trummelbach Falls. Inside a mountain, her hair blew wildly, a cold mist slapped her face. She reveled in the power of the melting glacier, its speed and force, powerful enough to hollow out a mountain.
Its existence was explained yet still makes no sense to her.
Nothing about this place does. Not its beauty, not its magical ability to make you forget.
She leaned over the edge of a railing, almost desperate. “How can we hold onto this?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper over the roar of the water crashing below.
She and the woman from Florida both stared at it, trying to take in the way the sun broke through the canyon, shining onto that raging water, as if the rocks were being pummeled into diamonds.
“Close your eyes,” the woman said. “Breathe it in and take it with you.”
She did not hesitate. Her eyelids folded and an unsteadiness took over.
All that altitude. All that magnificence.
After a moment, they both opened their eyes.
“May it be so,” the woman said.
Then she turned, descending the steps that brought them here.
What else can be done?
A light smile graced her lips, a gentle hope filled her heart.
May it be so.
Lainy Carslaw is a writer, gymnastics coach, and mother or three boys from Pittsburgh, PA. She has her MFA in Fiction from Chatham and a poetry degree from University of Pittsburgh. Her work can be found with Brevity, Sandy River Review, several editions of The Madwomen in the Attic Anthology, and her local newspaper, The Hampton News.