A Fatal Selfie

This can’t be happening. My mother warned me to stay away from the edge of the canyon. But dammit, the shadows from the setting sun highlighted all the right places. If I could balance a little bit so the fading rays would catch my blond hair, the picture would be awesome. Selfies aren’t so difficult when you know how to position your body. So at the ledge, I arch backwards just a little, to give my hair some swing room. It glistens in the five o'clock sun. Tilting slightly left, the sun's illumination is just right, but I feel my balance shift.

Just a little too much...

So now I’m in freefall mode. The colors of the canyon change as I tumble. I recall thinking how gorgeous the rust reds, sienna browns, and new greens were as I stood eye-level with the canyon’s edges miles from my picturesque spot looking at the canvas below me. Now they whiz past, and I cannot appreciate their beauty. If only I’d stayed still. If only I’d handed my phone to the tourists near me, the ones who offered to take my picture. Sigh. Where’s my phone now? Will they find it? Will my mother see I took a picture as I fell? She’ll be so pissed.

The colors of this natural wonder I so admired from the top ledge just a little while ago aren’t so vivid now. As I race towards my final resting place, the rust reds are streaked with the plain brown of rocks and dirt holding them in place. The sienna browns are overgrown dead grasses in desperate need of the river water. The new greens get brighter and brighter as I near them, showing me that they're really tree tops and shrubs sheltering who-knows-what kinds of critters. I read somewhere that some tribes of Indians actually live somewhere down here. Will they be the ones who find my body?

I hear the air whizzing past me, and my ears pop with the sudden change in pressure. I can hardly keep my eyes open from the wind shear, but I'm aware that up is down, and down is above me. The temperature warms as I near the bottom of the canyon. I read, that somewhere, too. That the temperature fluctuates wildly in different areas.

That river, once below me a few seconds ago, is fastly rising to meet me. It looked like a thin, slithering snake in the deep grooves of the Grand Canyon from above. Now, it’s growing into a roaring force of nature, widening and churning as I fall towards it. Oh, crap. My mother is really going to kill me if I mess up my face. Mother always told me to be careful, look where I’m going, and take my head out of the clouds. I wish my head were in a cloud. I have the sneaking suspicion that once my head hits the canyon floor, it won’t resemble any one body part at all, but rather pieces and chunks of what used to be me. And my face, oh my face, won't look like Mommy any more.

She’ll want to say I-told-you-so, but she won’t. She'll want to drop to her knees and bury herself in the earth. I hope she won't watch as they haul my body parts out. I’ve heard that’s what they do--lift the pieces they can find, if they find any. The alarming rate at which I'm falling increases my desperation. Is there any way I can survive?

It’s almost funny how the sky now looks like a tiny space of blue, and the walls around me a gigantic prison of brown. Hurtling toward the once ocean-covered canyon floor, I’m overcome with embarassment. Oh snap! I’m going to become a statistic! At first, my picture will be in the local paper with sympathetic headlines about my untimely demise. What picture will they use? My facebook profile picture is pretty good--the one at my cousin’s wedding. Then time will fade memory, and only my family and friends will think of me, often at first, less frequently with passing months. Finally I will be remembered with shake of the head and disapproval of my accident, a preventable one.

Closer the ground approaches, and the somersaults I perform are beyond my control. The river, the river shows me its majesty. I see white caps on the waves, fast-moving debris rushing by, and I have a sudden thought. Maybe if I hold my breath when I hit the water, and enter the water like a diver, I can rise to the sur---.

Splash! Silence. The vultures circle, the air settles, and the parting waters return together to claim another life.