[i]Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i] My feet pound into the rocky grit which scatters around me but never slips, please let it never slip. The wind slips around my ears and spreads the hair back from my eyes as I run, as we all run, and I hear the others all  thudding all around me as we drive down the long hill in thunderous waves, dirt flying up in clouds as our feet strike home, [i]thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]

I wish I could remember when it all started, and I wonder if there was a starting line, and whether there will be prizes afterward. Under a pale blue sky that grows hazier off in the distance, so that none can see where we are headed, we dash on, each keeping the rhythm of his or her own stride, as if it was some patented secret. 

Some of us are carrying things, stuff we saw and snatched up as we sped by. I’d had an armful of pretty little shells, one with fourteen rainbow whorls that I had counted over and over; a rock that had been polished in its endless tumble down the hill, an old tooth… Then I’d stumbled over a hidden stump and came heart-stoppingly close to losing control and falling. I’d recovered, but all my things had flown out of my pinwheeling arms, sailing out and around me to bounce away over the slope. I never saw any of them again. Can’t go back. [i]Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]

I see sometimes from the corner of my eye, what happens if you fail. That one gal who’d been running the longest I could remember. She’d reached to grab a curious little red twig, and then something put her off balance, I never knew what. She fell and screamed as she bounced along, unable to regain her feet, and none of us in turn could stop to help her. [i]Thud. Thud. Thud. [/i]Her bounces got higher and harder, and soon she stopped screaming. But her body stayed bouncing until there wasn’t anything left to bounce down the slope. I’m pretty sure the tooth I had came from someone who died like that. [i]Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]

I have a feeling it’s not much longer. How long can it go on like this? I find myself daydreaming, then I see it up ahead. A pretty little stone, glinting like a sunrise over a mountain, resting on that dead branch. But that guy next to me, he’s seen it too. It’s going to be close… I try to time it right to get there first, but we’re both running so fast—

He reaches me first and shoves me to the side and that should be the end of it, but I recover and jump back, my shoulder shoving his as we reach the branch.

And we both miss, of course, and we knock that pretty gem to the ground and that should be all she wrote. But we managed to slap it ahead of us and now it’s bounding before us, with just enough momentum to stay out of our grasps. Now, he tries to shove me aside, and of course I have to shove back, and it’s only going to be a matter of time. [i]Thud. Thud. Thud. Trip—[/i]

He tripped, that bastard tripped! 

But then, so did I. 

Now we’re both tumbling, and the world is spinning around me and I see the sky and the ground whirling by more and more rapidly, but it’s always punctuated by the flash of that little gem as it bounces ahead. And his bounces are getting higher and so are mine, but I keep myself straight somehow amid all the flying dirt and the sharp rocks that stick out of the slope, and he—he comes down hard once, at the wrong angle, and there’s a crack, and he’s silent henceforth. 

I know it’s impossible to get back to my feet, but I try anyway, and I manage to get myself somersaulting forward, keeping a rhythm behind the jewel. I have time to study it now, the afterimages burned into my eyelids, and I swear I’ve seen this one before, but—

Suddenly the slope runs out. And now I’m spinning through space, into a void with no bottom I can see, but as I fall I reach out one last time for the gem...

And I miss it.

But at least it’s falling with me.

Together we plunge down, me, the gem, and my heartbeat.

[i]Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]