Gemini by Carol Cassella

wind driving in from the southwest so strong even the walls of the ravine made no shelter; branches tossed and cracked over their heads. The swing was hitched around a smaller branch as always, a tacit rule of its use. Someone too short or too frustrated by the wind snatching the rope away had added a tether to the end: two feet of braided nylon tied to the knot that served as a handhold. Bo stepped up to go first, as if to prove himself. He didn’t look at Raney; he hardly even looked down at the water. He unloosed the rope and pulled it as close as it would come, stretching the line nearly straight. The limb swayed, a band of bark polished to a gleam by a thousand jumpers, the rope nearly grown into the wood. He locked one fist on top of the other, just above the thick swell of the knot. Raney could see dark coiled hair under his arms. She was about to remind him not to make the same mistake again, not to let fear keep him holding on until he passed the moment of safe release, but he was already off—one low grunt as he leaped away from the earth and swung out and down, the weight of him stretching the rope, moving impossibly slow, his knees flexed to his waist until he keened and let go at the perfect, perfect point where physical law carried him just enough forward and then down, down to the deepest point of green-black water. His head disappeared for a moment and then popped up, laughing with the ecstasy of defying death. “All right, little girl,” he called out. “Your turn.”
    Perhaps it was that “little girl” business. Without that, it might have gone differently. Raney might have stuck with the common sense she had always used in these woods and this water, and considered how this rope was changed by the nylon tether. The wind was channeling down the ravine in great bursts strong enough to knock her off balance, and the rope kept trying to lurch away, so she had to hold it by the added tail. She stepped onto the highest root and stretched for the knot, waited for a calm in the wind. Bo squatted on the opposite bank tossing pebbles at the base of the tree crooning her name in a catcall. She could hear the next roar of wind coming, a great whipping in the green crown above and the litter of leaves and small branches rattling toward her along the water, moving so fast the temperature dropped and she began to shiver. She kept one arm locked around the tree until the last second, blocking out Bo’s teasing jeer, and then, finally, shoved off in sheer defiance, defying the storm and Bo and the voice telling her this was not the perfect, safe moment. She was not ready.
    The instant of free fall before the rope stretched taut was usually the best—exhilarating and terrifying and dangerously reckless. That few seconds of time stretched into a crystal-clear memory you could use to mark that day in that summer in your life, distinct from all the billions of pointless seconds that blurred into background. But this time Raney began her fall at the instant the wind hit, stinging and wild, pelting her with sticks and leaves so she fumbled and took off spinning. The hard braid of the nylon tether whipped around her arm and doubled over itself and now, now was the instant she had to let go or miss the deep pool. She couldn’t see Bo, couldn’t see the water, but she knew the arc and stretch and plunge so well she let go by instinct, not connected to the part of her brain that sensed the nylon rope coiling around her arm like a venomous snake. Her body fell, then caught and jerked back toward the tree, locked to the rope by the tether until the weakest link, her skin, broke free.
    She heard Bo scream. She was lying on her back and Bo was over her, screaming her name, open-mouthed and twisted in excruciating pain—it took a full blessed minute to realize it was her own pain. Fire, worse than fire, seared her arm from her elbow to her shoulder. It scorched down her spinal cord and up her neck like hot poison. She