The Last Peak
Frost crept across the top of Cillian’s boots and coiled around their laces. The strings shot off in opposite directions, frozen into gravity-defying shapes that almost seemed to mock him. Mist puffed in front of Cillian as he gave an annoyed snort, already imagining what his aunt Ella would’ve said if she saw it. He shook the boots, only managing to get more frost inside them, and the motion dislodged an old memory.
***
“You better sleep with anything you don’t want frozen. Here, feel it.” Ella tossed Cillian a small white bottle through the open tent flap.
“Oh, wow. I didn’t even know sunblock could freeze.” Cillian said as he tried to squeeze the bottle.
“Sunblock, lip balm, thermoses, socks, dogs, you’d be surprised. If you don’t want it to be an icicle in the morning, put it in your sleeping bag. I can tell you’re not a real backpacker—you didn’t clank every time you rolled over in your sleep. Now put that in a warm pocket and help me pack up.”
She was already dressed and out of the tent, standing next to a pack almost as tall as she was. Ella was wearing her beat-to-hell baseball cap that was probably old enough to vote, and her sun-ravaged skin stood out in the background of white snow. Cillian looked down at the frozen bottle and wondered why anyone would ever do something like this for fun.
***
Turning over the boots in his hands, Cillian decided that Ella would’ve seen his negligence as a kind of betrayal. She would’ve chewed him out in that half-laughing way of hers, her slight Irish lilt getting stronger as she pretended to get angrier—but he was alone, 7000 feet above sea level, surrounded by ice and rocks and stunted trees and silence, and Ella was a pile of ashes in his pack.
She wasn’t even in a real urn. Too fucking pretentious, she’d said. What remained of her body was instead packed inside her favorite oversized water bottle. God, he already missed her sense of humor.
Now all the mountains seemed dead without her. To Cillian, their majesty was overshadowed by his constant runny nose and altitude headache. He’d trade all the austere, wild beauty for a beige office building with florescent lighting in a second if it meant he’d get central heating.
He had lied to her, towards the end. It would’ve crushed Ella, wasting away on a hospital bed, to know that he hadn’t set foot on a mountain in years. He said what she wanted to hear, that she had instilled in him a true love of the outdoors, that he never felt more free than in the snow. Remembering that, the boots felt heavy, physical evidence of the truth.
When Cillian put his first foot in, the sensation skipped past cold, past frigid, and went straight to pain. He tried to laugh at himself, and the pain, as he packed up camp and set off, but ended up muttering constant obscenities to cope.
There was no real path even at this time of year. All signs of direction were buried under thigh-deep fresh powder. Only two hours later, Cillian was panting, lungs stabbed by the frigid air, legs burning, pack cutting into his shoulders. He was post holing in the snow every other step, and the slope was steep enough that he was climbing more than walking. He was hitting his limit, he could tell, and on this terrain that was dangerous. Of course, Ella wanted to be scattered at the peak—one last challenge, maybe?
***
“You have to know when to stop, right?” Cillian said, sprawled out on a snowbank, sweaty, and eating more than his fair share of snack bars.
“Nah, fuck that. I’m willing to die. Either I’m walking down that mountain successful, or they’ll have to roll my corpse down for the wake.” She was trying to keep a straight face, and then burst out laughing as she saw Cillian’s horrified expression. “C’mon, no nephew of mine’ll be a quitter!”
***
Cillian could see the peak above him, now. Less than 500 feet. Just another hour of hell and he’d finally put Ella to rest. “Ah, fuck it.” Cillian turned around, took a breath, and started back down the mountain. There was always next year, and hell, Ella always could take a joke.