She’s climbing up the old mountain, it’s late spring, overcast, yet oddly bright; the slopes, now rocky, green, and peppered with wildflowers are narrower than she remembers. The chairlift seats hang in the air like strung words, their speaker stopped mid-sentence. There’s the smell of dead things thawing. As she hikes, she recalls a story her father told her when she was young, how his friend Paul V. skied over a drop-off unable to see a girl lying below. He skied over her face. Her father said, Immediately move off to the side if you fall. She always did. Trash of winters past reveals itself: baskets from ski poles bloom like mushrooms under the pines, a bra waves from a branch, a wine haggis resembling a flattened lung slumps over a stump. She stops to sit and rest in the middle of a run, pulling a handful of dried fruit from her pocket. She looks up the hill, sees her father skiing through the wildflowers the way he did through snow, with controlled effortlessness, his upper body perfectly still. The occasional rocks don’t faze him; he skis over them and they crumble beneath him. She senses he’s smiling. He must have missed me after all this time, she thinks. Has it been eight years? She imagines how he’ll wipe the tip of his dripping nose with the back of his black-gloved hand before he kisses her. He’s getting closer now, carving cursive in the dirt, the grasses. She waves ecstatically. He doesn’t slow down or acknowledge that she’s there. She realizes he doesn’t see her. But she can’t get up or cry out. She’s forgotten the rules of the mountain. She’s where she should not be, the girl with the lost face.
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Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in Tampa Review, Rust & Moth, Tinderbox, The American Journal of Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in HAD, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books.