THE CHASM 

By Tessa Harvey


    Perhaps she had somehow crawled back up the slope and gone home without telling him. Perhaps.
    That hope ended when a message came in the Math class for him to go to the principal's office. "Well, Dufaye," queried the head, "what have you got to say for yourself?" His uncle was also in the room with a police officer. Spread on the desk were the wonderful photos of Ariella  and the setting sun - and one he had failed to notice. The girl, terror-stricken, beginning to fall.
    He had no words to answer. 
    Eventually his uncle took him home pending further investigation. Then the child's parents came. 
    "What were you thinking?" whispered the mother, Mrs. Colvan.
 "Tell us what happened," demanded the father, white-faced with anger.
    Ariella's backpack had caught on a small twisted bush a few metres below the edge. She looked up, breathless as more dirt cascaded down. The roots were slipping. With great concentration, the girl focused on her feet and on nothing else.
    "God help me," she whispered. A tiny lip of clay supported her feet, but if the shrub gave way suddenly, that foothold would not hold her.
    Gently, she pulled on her backpack. Her asthma inhaler was inside and she needed it. A tiny bit at a time, her bag came free, then she slipped and twisted desperately towards the edge of the cliff, scrabbling for a handhold and fell forwards.
    There was a tiny space where a boulder had broken free and she twisted into it, then pulled the bush after her. It blocked the small opening, but also hid her from above. She heard the boy's shrill voice for a long time echoing across the chasm till it broke in despair and tiredness.

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