The Community EditionGRAINS OF RED SAND
You begin bouldering when you are 11. Your first time at the climbing gym, you gaze at the plastic holds, like candies, your mouth agape.
You take to it quickly, and before long, you’re the gym’s pet. You scamper, awed by men and women with vein-roped forearms, standing cock-hipped, hands folded in front of them, perpetually dipping in and out of chalk buckets. They are easy eyed, strong bodied, fearless, muscles twitch in their backs.
You meet Q. He’s 26. He’s tall. His arms hang from his body like steel chords and he’s different from the other boulder rats. Stronger. Intense. They say he was raised in a cave in Red Rocks, Nevada. Trained in the dark and became a beast. Your child-eyes flit darkly, absorbing everything Q does.
He says his secret is a small bag of red sand and rubs the grains between his hands like he’s washing them.
“Dark magic,” he laughs. “Good luck.”
You watch the sand trickle as though grains in an hourglass.
At 13, you beg Q to be your coach.
“Will you train hard?” he asks.
You nod vigorously.
“These are your best years,” Q warns. “But only if you work.”
He becomes your coach. Who knew? Rock climbing? Rock climbing isn’t a job, but you’re getting so good that Q says it could be. Your eyes glitter, picturing what he describes: sponsorships, stipends, world travel, medals, pushing the limits of human possibility.
Your first national comp comes. In the car, you gaze at Q, telling stories of his own competitions, training, his time in the cave.
The comp starts and you’re alone in the spotlight. Over the crowd and DJ and screaming MC, Q is a silent, intense presence of focus, watching slack-faced, like the dark waters of a stagnant pool.
You approach the boulder, hands shaking, but on the wall, silence. You flow through movement, until your toenail folds backwards inside your shoe, slick blood mixing with foot sweat. Pain tears through, and when you hit the mat, chalk erupting in a cloud, you search the crowd for Q and find his back turned, walking away.
After, in Q’s car, you wonder what’s next. He turns to you, the shadows around his eyes hang low, and his skin is waxy and slick. He looks like he’s wearing a mask of his own face, and his voice comes flat and hollow.
“Come back when you’ll try hard.”
“But!”
You gesture at your injured toe, you present your palms, worn from the holds, irritated and pink.
“Training is a war we wage against our bodies. Pain convinces it to transform.”
“I want to be great.”
Gravel crunches as Q steers to the shoulder. He turns to you, face shadowed.
He tilts back your head, opening your mouth, and he presses a pinch of red sand onto your tongue, like medicine, like sacrament. The sand is gritty, crystalline, tinkling as you grind it with your teeth. The slurry slides down your throat, plummets to your belly’s depths.
The rest of the drive home is silent. Q is reptilian in the driver’s seat, and you turn to wood beside him, silt sloshing in your stomach with every pothole and bend.
At the climbing gym, Q ignores you. You watch him take on other pupils, starry eyed 12- and 13-year-olds, rearing for competition. Your face burns red with shame. You’re getting sick. At night, you toss, cough grit in the bathroom sink, but never all of it. You can still feel the sand sloshing in your belly, and the skin on your hands is thinning, turning pink, turning red. You can’t stop training. There is a voice inside you, and though you try not to listen, it whispers.
You need a red-sanded cave of your own.
You begin roving at night, collecting pallet wood, collecting fibre glass, collecting scrap metal. You climb to the steepled ceilings of your attic and screw the garbage to the walls, making your own gym. Endlessly, you climb laps, tracing an infinity symbol, your shoes filling with blood and sweat and fungus. You abandon the gym with the candy holds. You turn inside.
Q’s words echo: Training is a war we wage against our bodies. Pain convinces it to transform. You feel his focus, blank, opaque, grating.
As the weeks drag and summer comes, hot, close, heavy, you disappear deeper into your attic. A smell hangs thick against the slanted walls, sour, fungal, mildewed, rotting. Climbing shoes, yes, but there’s another scent too. Something darkens and twists and latches in your mind. Crouched in your homemade cave you inspect your bloodied fingers, eyes blank.
You’ll have less to carry if your body becomes smaller. You stop eating, your hair thins, teeth loosen and fall out, your bones turn brittle, and you continue to train. Your face becomes hollow and waxy and masklike. Your elbows and fingers stiffen, curl into claws.
Your toes break. They are like flaccid bags of meat and gravel, and you hunch over them, whimpering between attempts on the wall. Your shoulder blades peel and wing from your ribcage, your spine between them, knuckled and glassy.
You’re dying.
And you know it.
You want the sand out of you, but it never leaves, red grains worming their ways to every nook, every cranny, grinding between your joints and the emptiness behind your eyes.
You need to stop, need to slow the momentum, to rest, but the sand itches you to push through, sharp fractals like seed crystals, geometrics between sinew and fibre and neuron.
In a haze, you stumble through darkness to your old gym with its candy holds. On broken feet, you lurch, unaccustomed to walking.
You find Q, parting the crowd around him, presenting yourself, your body twisted and mangled.
When he sees you gazing up at him, ghoulish, squinting, cowering, he stares back, placid and blank. Someone screams.
Q turns his back. Weeping, you turn yours as well, dragging yourself home to train.
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