John gritted his teeth against the pulsating pain. He had been lying at 
the bottom of the ravine for twenty-five minutes, and his ankles had gone 
from painful to numb and back again several times. He wasn't sure which 
was worse.

It came out of nowhere, the cliff that he had somehow skied off of, the 
landing that had crunched his bones and rippled through his body, the 
crevasse that the softly falling snow occasionally found its way into. 
John had taken risks -- driven drunk, rock climbed to dizzying heights, 
flown on the first commercial flight into NYC after September 11th -- and, 
half-delirious, he chuckled to himself as he noted once again that this 
weekend was a simple vacation, a chance for him and Megan to escape from 
the city, a chance for their relationship to settle. 

Even before the fall, it hadn't turned out that way. The first night up 
they had had a fight about nothing -- whenever he would look back at 
things the next day, he would realize how silly the catalyst always was -- 
and today they had gone their separate ways, taking some time to cool off, 
taking separate paths down the mountain.

John had always found the mountain relaxing, the rhythm of the slaloming 
down, left, right, left, right, and after this latest fight with Megan he 
was looking forward to hitting fresh snow on the back side of the 
mountain, the solitary part, unsullied. He took the ski lift up with some 
teenagers, and was relieved to see that they were snowboarding away on the 
front side of the mountain. He reached the steep downhill and breathed a 
deep breath before hurtling down the mountain.

It was freedom -- freedom to fly, freedom from worries, freedom from life, 
exhilarating new air all the time, diverting his human cannonball around 
trees and bumps and occasionally deciding (always deciding) to take one, 
launched into three dimensions for a couple of seconds before returning to 
the earth. It was these moments where he was surrounded by air all around 
him when he lost track of his thoughts.

But the fateful jump felt different from the beginning. He closed his eyes 
and was about to make a wish, but he felt something unsettling and opened 
them, only to see space in front of him, no snow. The ten meters per 
second per second of gravity kicked in, and in front of him he saw 
nothing, and then all of a sudden there was a steep cliff, jutting out, 
leaning towards him, and he flailed with his arms and skis, the latter 
slamming into the rock with a metallic clang before shattering away, 
leaving his legs to bear the brunt of things. After the crunch, he fell to 
the ground, looked up, and saw only a small hole in the rock. He tried to 
clamber to his feet, but the legs didn't work; the pain was intense, and 
he fell over wheezing.

After the screaming, he lay on his back and waited for the end. The snow, 
fluffy and nonthreatening, crept occasionally through the opening in the 
rock. He opened his mouth and caught flake after flake on his tongue, 
everything quiet inside the opening, biting his tongue and clenching his 
fist against the pain, voice silent, frozen in time, thinking in circles, 
waiting for time to expire.