The Question
Forty-Seven Feet
The Question
[Quarry outside Cedar Falls, Iowa. October 9th. 7:14 AM.]
The rat had been chewing since Cairo was seven—eleven years of teeth on bone, not a metaphor, not a flutter, not any of the pretty things people call it. A rat. White-hot. Patient. It had eaten through most of the soft parts already. Now it was working on bone.
Cairo stood at the edge of the quarry, toes curled over limestone, and looked down. Blue-green water. Still as something dead. The colour reminded her of—she didn’t know what. Something that didn’t exist. A corpse’s eye, maybe, if corpses had eyes like that. They didn’t. But the comparison felt right. Everything felt like death lately. Might as well lean into the poetry.
Across the quarry, a tire swing hung from the oak—bald rubber, frayed rope, the kind of thing that got kids out here in July, shrieking and cannonballing the water with their stupid alive bodies. Same ledge. Same drop. Different math.
Mass times acceleration. Stone meeting bone. The math was clean. The math was the only clean thing left. Her bladder was full—she’d been holding it since 4 AM, since she gave up on sleep and walked here in the dark, the route memorized from a summer when she was twelve and thought swimming in abandoned quarries was rebellious instead of just sad. Her feet ached. The Docs she’d bought in August didn’t fit anymore—she’d grown a half-size since September and hadn’t told anyone. Who would she tell? Who would care about a half-size?
Wind off the water. Limestone and rust and something rotting in the scrub brush—animal, maybe, or just October doing what October does to everything soft.
She should be scared. That’s what happens, right? The edge, the height, the body’s ancient rebellion against falling. Scrambling back. Weeping. Grateful. The sad girl finds her reason, cue the swelling music, roll credits on the after-school special nobody asked for.
But the water didn’t care about her reasons. Neither did she. It was easy. Easy like swallowing vomit—that hot rush of bile in the throat, the burn, the gulp. You smile at whoever’s watching. I’m fine. You feel almost proud for conquering the revolt of your own gut. The water waited. Indifferent as a bill collector. Jump or don’t. I have all day. I have forever. What’s one more body?
That familiar teeth-on-bone scrape. And then—sudden, violent, from somewhere she couldn’t name—
Hunger. Not for the water. Not for the math. For something. She wanted to climb down there and lick the stone. Wanted to tear the sky open with her fingernails. Wanted to grab the world by the throat and shake it until it gave her a reason, any reason, even a bad one—
She didn’t jump. She turned around.
