“The Welfare State,” by Nell Zink

The world beyond the ridgetop was a wall of gray cloud. One could look down to the left or the right at a forty-five-degree angle and see only gray. From the mist came loud moos and the clatter of cowbells. The American was too frightened to move. She had felt cheerful on the sheltered concrete of the viewing platform, relaxed on the broad stairway with its sturdy bannister, and well enough on the roadlike path that looped behind the reassuring mass of the restaurant. The narrowing, roughening, and horizon-lowering that had turned that path into this trail had been gradual. Now its quality of teetering in space made her want to get on her knees and crawl. The ground, composed of loose grit and softball-size rocks, was visibly wet. Her German friend Vroni was already twenty yards ahead. Crouching to lower her center of gravity, Julia took three short steps and halted. She cocked her wrists to catch herself if she fell, and stood up half straight. Time to decelerate and deepen her breathing. “Slow down!” she called out. Vroni turned on a dime and came back, bounding like a chamois. She stood before Julia, casually shifting her weight around, her beanie pushed back over her hazelnut hair, her questioning eyes an opaque brown. For all the exertion and the cold, her skin tone was even and yellowish, like a chain-smoker’s, although she wasn’t one. She rolled her own cigarettes to save money; this took time, and couldn’t be done non-stop, so the spots on her teeth did not entirely match her eyes. The pink, patrician Julia, with her irreproachably healthy life style, swayed stiffly in an awkward squat, red-cheeked and trembling. She flattered herself that she liked to leap and romp, but that was only on even surfaces such as lawns and sandy beaches, where the appropriate animal comparison would be to a clumsy calf. For reasons of her own (osteopenia), she romped where it was safe to fall down. There being no courage without fear, she preferred activities that entailed neither. She routinely wore a helmet and gloves when riding a bicycle, and she had recently refused a ride in a glamorous classic car because it lacked shoulder belts and headrests. Just the other day, she had given her cowardice a workout on a Ferris wheel in Thun. When the gondola commenced to rise, she had slid to the floor and hugged its central pillar. By the third revolution, however, she was back on her seat, reassured that the bolt attaching her gondola to the wheel (there were countless bolts in the wheel to allow it to be dismantled for transport, but only the one above the gondola seemed to hold her life in its hands) was an inch and a half in diameter and smooth, without visible rust. The ridge that she and Vroni were on now was literally the ground-a well-trodden promenade through a pasture, thick with footprints. She made a vain attempt to justify her...

Preview: ~500 words