If At First You Don’t Succeed [FICTOID]

She came sliding down the smooth crystal facet of the diamond for the ten thousandth time.

The diamond towered above her like Sagarmāthā (better known to non-Nepalese as Mount Everest).

By all rights the friction from her slide should have burned her skin off, the velocity should have pulverized her when she hit bottom.

Instead, it felt painful, bn=ut only for a moment/

Then the pain subsided and all she was left with was the huge diamond.

Imagine a bowl with a large crystal pyramid in the center.  Move away from the pyramid and the walls of the bowl soon rise almost vertically, making escape impossible.

But the diamond…

Way up at the very top of the diamond she could make out a shimmering halo.

it might be a portal out of here, she told herself.  In any case, I won’t know until I check it out.

That’s why she tried climbing.

But the steep sides of the diamond’s facets always thwarted her.  She’d get a quarter of the way up…half…two-thirds…

…and then she’d slide down again.

She couldn’t remember how she got there.  She couldn’t remember anything about her existence before awakening at the base of the diamond.

Am I dead?  Am I in hell?

Or am I just in purgatory?

Does it matter?  There’s nothing to do except climb this stupid rock.

So she set out again on her ten thousandth and one try.

© Buzz Dixon