Vanished at the Cliff’s Edge
🔴 I CALLED OUT HIS NAME BUT ALL I HEARD WAS THE WIND WHISTLING.
I froze, staring at the picnic blanket, still warm from where he’d been sitting just minutes ago. He’d said he was going to “look at the view.”
The cliff was crumbly, the air thick with the scent of pine and something vaguely metallic, like old pennies. A stupid shiver danced across my skin. I called his name again, louder this time, my voice cracking. Nothing.
He’d seemed different lately, distant. Not angry, just…gone. Like he was already halfway out the door. “Is this it, then?” I’d asked him last night, and he’d just looked at me, eyes blank. “Is this how it ends?”
My phone buzzed, shattering the silence. It was a picture. A selfie, him grinning, standing right at the cliff’s edge… and someone else was there, too, just out of frame.
👇 Full story continued in the comments…
I stared at the picture, my blood turning to ice. Him, grinning, the wind whipping his hair, the sheer drop behind him. And that shape, that outline of another body just within the frame, a hand perhaps, or a shoulder. My mind went wild – had someone pushed him? Was he showing me he was leaving with someone else? Was it a final message?
I tried calling him, my fingers fumbling with the screen. It rang and rang, then went to voicemail. “Are you okay?” I gasped into the phone, my voice trembling. “What is happening? Who is that?” I sent a frantic text. ‘Delivered’, but no reply. The silence stretched, punctuated only by the relentless whistle of the wind.
I couldn’t sit there anymore. Every instinct screamed at me to move, to *see*. I scrambled to pack the blanket and the half-eaten sandwiches, my movements jerky and panicked. The path to the cliff edge wasn’t long, but it was steep and uneven. I stumbled, my lungs burning, the metallic scent in the air now tasting like dread. The selfie was burned into my mind – that smile, the abyss, the phantom person.
When I finally reached the top, breathless and shaking, I stopped dead.
There he was. He wasn’t alone.
But it wasn’t what I’d imagined. Standing a little way back from the very edge, near a sturdy rock, was a figure. Not menacing, but… waiting. And as I looked closer, I recognized the figure. It was Sarah, his cousin, who did photography as a side hustle.
He turned, alerted by my sudden arrival. His eyes widened in surprise, then a complex mix of panic and relief. “You… you came up?”
He wasn’t grinning now. He looked sheepish, his earlier bravado gone. Sarah gave me a small, sympathetic smile.
He walked towards me, running a hand through his hair. “I… I wasn’t expecting you yet,” he stammered. “The picture… I sent it…”
My legs felt weak. “The picture?” I whispered, gesturing towards my phone. “And Sarah? What is going on?”
He took a deep breath, looking from me to Sarah, then back. “I was trying to set something up,” he admitted, his voice low. “I wanted to… to ask you something. Here. With this view. Sarah was going to capture the moment.” He glanced back towards the cliff edge, then quickly away. “I’ve been so nervous about it, that’s why I’ve been distant. I didn’t know how to act. And the selfie… I don’t know why I sent it, nerves I guess, or maybe a cryptic clue that went wrong. I was waiting for Sarah to get positioned.”
He reached into his pocket, his hand shaking slightly, and pulled out a small box. It wasn’t the dramatic, cliff-edge proposal he’d planned, but standing there, wind-whipped and trembling on the crumbly ground, the fear I’d felt overriding the sudden understanding, it felt more real than any perfect moment ever could.
“Is this it, then?” he echoed my words from last night, looking into my eyes, the question now full of vulnerability, not blankness. “Is this how it begins?”