The Slopes by Mather Schneider

While riding up on the ski lift, like toys on a mobile, the young woman told the young man she was pregnant. Only about a foot of snow covered the ground beneath the pines. It was not enough snow for the ski slopes to open for skiing; the lift was a pleasure ride.

“What?” the young man said. “I thought you were using something?”

“I guess it didn’t work.”

“You guess it didn’t work? Are you sure it’s mine?”

“Of course it’s yours!”

But in her mind, she wasn’t sure.

The mountain forest was silent except for the rollers and pulleys that clicked and clacked as the lift chairs rose to the poles and then dipped down again on the thick cables.

An older woman sat with her husband two chairs in front of them, hoping those cables wouldn’t break. She turned and looked back at the young couple.  

“They’re arguing,” she said.

“Don’t be nosy,” her husband said.

He put his arm around her and pulled her closer, as much to keep himself warm as her. She’s getting chubby, he thought.

The older woman looked down past her dangling green tennis shoes at the snow-covered ground 30 feet below. The snow was littered with items that people had dropped while riding the ski lift: mittens, stocking caps, coffee cups, broken sleds, sunglasses. She could almost reach out and touch the branches of the pine trees. At one point, she looked down into a bird’s nest. Nothing in there.

“Shit!” the young man said. “What are you going to do about this?”

The young couple were dressed in the latest fall fashions, brand new jeans and coats bright as candy wrappers.

“You don’t think I’m going to get rid of it, do you?” the young woman said.

The young man stared down at the ground and wondered if he would die if he fell or jumped.

The older man was hungover. He shifted in the uncomfortable lift chair. He felt an itch in his crotch and wondered if he’d caught something from the woman down the block. His thick hands were nervous, arthritic and beaten from laying brick in the sun for 30 years. The older woman touched her wedding ring. The older man had lost his wedding ring a couple of weeks before. He had been drunk and when he woke up the next morning the ring was gone, slipped off somewhere and disappeared, a pebble into soft snow. He told her he’d buy another ring, though he had no idea where the money would come from. They had been together for 21 years.

The older woman thought about the children she was never able to have. The adoptions they talked about but never followed through with. She thought about Antonio, the man from Utah she knew before she married her husband, how his wife had left him with three children and how he’d begged her to stay with him and be their mother.

She said to her husband, “Do you still love me?”

“Always.”

She snuggled close to him.

The late afternoon sun became visible over the mountain and shone into their faces. 

The young couple sat as far from each other as it was possible on a ski lift chair. The young man felt like he was on a nightmarish carnival ride. Why did this fucking thing go so slow? He thought about the Ferris Wheel that broke down last year at the Colima expo, when they were in Mexico. The Mexicans called it a rueda de fortuna. Wheel of fortune. They heard about it on the news. It stopped turning and stranded many people for hours. One man had climbed down. Everybody cheered when he reached ground but later, on the news, they criticized him because he had left his wife and child up there. The young woman shivered and started to cry.

At the summit, a park employee, just a kid, waited to assist them. He looked bored as the older couple stumbled off their chair and watched it clunk around the tower. They stood where he told them to, looked at the view for a few seconds, then waited for another chair to scoop them up and carry them down. The sun at their backs now.

The older woman turned and saw the young couple dismount at the top, silhouettes against the sunlight. God, her knees ached in the cold. Then she looked forward, down the mountain, at the lift chair in front of them, empty as it was, rocking in the air.  

Mather Schneider’s poetry and prose have appeared in hundreds of journals since 1994. His first novel, The Bacanora Notebooks and his story collection, Port Awful are both available from Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and works as an exterminator.