I huffed it up the hill. Sweat stung at my eyeballs and my face was a hot blister. My next tour group, the 3:30 crowd, was waiting for me up at the top. I had four groups a day and this would be my last. We would embark on an hour-long downhill walk of enchantment where I would point out local landmarks, make up stories about the architecture, and suggest that certain buildings were haunted. Between groups, I had twenty minutes to make it back up the hill before the next one got too crispy under the sun and started fidgeting for a refund. I hurried. The last thing I wanted to see was the German family I’d been emailing with sailing away on a fleet of city bikes, taking my tips away with them.
I was about to reach the top of the hill section before it turned into stairs when a shorebird pooped on my bare shoulder. I slammed my anchors for a moment to sludge off the green-white goo, but just a moment, truly. If I stopped any longer then little thoughts trickled into my head. But I wasn’t careful enough because oops, there they came. A little worm flickered through my head and it went like this. What if I just rolled down this hill? But no more. I spanked my ear, gathered my wits like skirts around my waist, and carried on up the hill as it transitioned into a set of concrete steps.
I was unable to see the top from the bottom but after thirty or so stairs, it wasn’t so bad. I was able to get into a groove, thinking left, right, left, right, and so on until I was one with the incline, a mountain goat, an old Italian woman who’d lived on a cliff her whole life. But then that really had me thinking. Because if an old Italian woman had lived on a cliff her whole life then the map of the world in her brain would be all up, down, north-south, crab walk, shuffle-shuffle, and not left-right, west-east like mine. This train of thought knocked me off my groove, tripped me up, and sent me tumbling down a bit. As I rolled down the stairs the thought came to me like this: if I just kept going and never stopped and picked up speed I would probably turn into a human missile of sorts and that sounded appealing but then I remembered that my cat would probably miss me if I were a missile. She would be very disappointed if I didn’t deliver her evening tuna. So I stopped my spinning, and falling, and I dusted myself off, spat on the cut blooming across my shin for the healing enzymes, and went back to the old left, right, left, right until I hoofed it past the place where I had just fallen and carried on.
The burning sensation in my thighs subsided into a numbness like sleep or maybe death right when the stairs came to an end which meant I only had a little further to go because the hill became so steep that the stairs couldn’t cut it. Someone long ago in the days of yore had chiseled handholds into the hill which was nearly a wall at that point. So there I went, taking it hand-by-hand and not going too fast because a fall would be perilous from up there and my hands were so wet with sweat that it seemed more believable that I had dunked my mitts into vats of sweat rather than actually created the stuff with my own glands and pores and whatnot. And I was thinking about all the water that was evaporating from the surface of my skin when I thought, my goodness, I’m losing a lot of water, and when was the last time I had something to drink? I recalled guzzling down something blue and popsicle flavored before I took off up the hill but my body seemed so depleted that even the memory, which was perhaps fifteen minutes old, had escaped my old chestnut of a head. This really had me thinking about memory loss and dementia and that sort of thing and how terrible it was to watch someone with Alzheimer’s eat a bagel and how they really couldn’t do it without someone chopping it into little morsels for them and nothing looks more disgusting cut into bite-sized pieces than a plain bagel glooped with cream cheese and salmon. And apparently, Alzheimer’s runs in the family which means it’s coming for me with its hot breath of forgetfulness but not, I thought, if I just let go of this handhold carved once upon a time by a Mesopotamian or actually just someone from like fifty years ago. And if I fell from this point on the wall-upon-the-hill, I could gain so much velocity falling and rolling down it that I could perhaps puncture the sound barrier with my body and shoot out way into the exosphere where the aliens and black holes live and maybe that was the life for me, but just as my left hand, the weaker and much sweatier one was slipping away, something brained me in the head and almost sent me falling for sure into missile-hood but something kept my right arm holding on strong. Then I heard a small crowd gasp above me and I looked up. It was my 3:30 tour group. They were holding one end of a garden hose for me to climb up because the last little bit of the wall was treacherous and worn away. Festhalten! Called one of the Germans. I didn’t know what that meant, but their act of generosity made me feel good about the group. Like they might be a fun bunch, with silly questions and good tips, and maybe afterward we could all go get pizza and that is exactly what happened.