“I can’t believe you’ve gotten us lost, Ivan! Again!” Nora exclaims, batting away at the thorny bushes invading the cliffside path, their pungent sweet scent clogging up my nose and tickling my throat.
“Why do you always blame me?”
She is angry. I made her angry.
It seems it’s all I am capable of at the moment. This was supposed to be our romantic retreat to celebrate our three-year wedding anniversary, a week away exploring the picturesque Cornish countryside. That’s what the brochure promised anyway.
When we first started dating, we loved trips like this. We were two budding explorers chasing adventure, following our hearts, and enjoying the sugary taste of impulsive decisions.
That’s how we ended up married.
We stumbled into a quaint church in the south of France, drunk on love and desperate to be tied together forever. I can’t be sure when it changed — when things became serious, and we had to grow up. Even if she won’t admit it herself, she’s grown to resent me.
I thought this trip would remind her of how we used to be.
She turns to me, eyes squinted. “Well, it’s hardly my fault, is it, Ivan? You said this was a shortcut!”
“It was supposed to be!”
“Look around! What do you see?” Nora gestures to the thick shrubbery enclosing us on the narrow path. If I jump, I can just about see the horizon and glimpse the sparkling ocean. Nora can’t see that. She can’t see anything apart from the blazing sky above and the taunting green encompassing her. We can’t even hear the crash of the waves from here.
“There’s nothing, Ivan! Nothing! Tell me this path ends soon, please.”
I frantically pat about my pockets for the map. I must find an escape from this never-ending hell for her. Bitter acid fills my mouth as the realization settles heavily in my gut.
Another reason for her to hate me.
Nora holds her hand out expectantly, the other resting on her waist. “The map?”
I gulp down the bile hoping she will go easy on me. “Is sat under my empty beer glass back at the pub…”
Her nostrils flare as she scoffs. “God, I can’t deal with this right now.”
She stalks away, but her confident stride falters in the shifting sand — we might as well have been walking on the beach with the expanse of it. Her frustration only encourages her to march more quickly, her blonde ponytail swinging with each step until she’s out of sight.
The fierce heat of the afternoon sun cools to a mild summer evening, but still, I trudge down the endless path, the dense hedging forcing us in only one direction.
The yellow gorse buds do nothing to hide their cruelty as they scratch at my bare legs.
But perhaps I deserve it.
“Nora. Nor, please, stop ignoring me!”
I jog heedfully — trying not to trip — to catch up with her. I grab her arm, and she spins around, hands flinging into the air.
“Why should I? Everything that comes out of your mouth leads to a bad decision. We’ve been walking for hours, the sun is starting to set, and we’re who knows where on the coast!”
She must have seen the apology in my eyes. “No, Ivan, don’t even try to apologize. The only reason we had to take this shortcut is because you took us off route to find a pub! I love you, but God, sometimes I just want to scream at you!” She crosses her arms over her heaving chest.
I stare down at her, the face I love stained red in anger and her eyes filling with tears.
Because of me.
Finally, I open my mouth. “Then do it.”
She shakes her head slightly, hiccupping a distorted, “Do what?”
“Scream at me, Nora.”
Her pout loosens, and she rears back slightly. “AHH!”
But I know she can do better than that. She just needs a little persuading.
“AHHH!” I scream.
She was never one to back down from a challenge.
“AHHHHH!” A charm of chaffinches take flight from a nearby bush, their shrieks joining our own.
“AHHHHHHHH!”
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” My face strains, and my forehead throbs, but I don’t stop. She needs this.
I need this.
“AHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHH!”
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHH AHH!” Our screams echo back to us like all our past selves are screaming with us.
A dog begins to howl in the distance, and her whole face brightens. “AHHHHH AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHH!”
We continue until our voices are coarse as sand. Then we can’t help but erupt into fits of snorting laughter. Eventually, they too cease, and we relish the silence together.
Nora intertwines her pinky finger with mine, and an unspoken promise passes between us. Only then do I take a moment to look around. No longer are we confined to the walls of the path, but we have found an escape to an open clifftop meadow. We stroll, hands swaying in time with the long grasses and cow parsley, before coming to a stop overlooking the vast ocean. The roar of the waves whispers in the wind, and I can just about taste the salt on my tongue.
There we stand, embracing, as the last of the sun’s rays shatter into thousands of diamonds on the water’s surface and the sky darkens to an endless black.
“This silly little leaflet is right,” Nora murmurs as she takes it out of her pocket. “It really is beautiful.”
As she opens it gently, something flutters to the ground.
A map.
Eliza Wilson has always had a wild imagination and a need to share it with the world. Now in the final year of her Creative Writing degree, she is honing her skills on the page and working on her fantasy trilogy, Secrets of Pinewood. You can usually find Eliza sitting in a cozy corner of a cafe, oat milk, iced vanilla latte in hand, hunched over a notebook, and escaping into the world at the tip of her pen.
Featured image by Les Attridge on Unsplash.
