Girl's POV
I've been waiting for this moment my whole life. I've trained and ached over this moment for all of my fourteen years. Fear is scraping against my bones, trying to claw its way in. It hurts like hell, but I won't let it penetrate me. I remember what my instructor said once, during a particularly hard drill, "I am fine with you having feelings, but fear is not a feeling. Fear is a choice that you must make."
Right now, I have to make the choice. As I look down, another wave of terror overcomes me, and I almost lose my grip on the groove in the mountain. I have to remember what I'm here for. To break a record. To become famous, as famous as famous gets in this small mountain village in God knows where. But I made this choice: without any help, I would attempt to climb one of the region's tallest peaks. I'm doing that right now. My mother would be proud. I wonder where she is, what she's doing, if she's thinking about me. I look up and realize that I'm not as far from the peak as I thought. I climb on.
Man's POV
I tune the ancient AM/FM radio on my desk to the only music station this long lost town gets, the opera house from the next town over's live broadcast. I can hear the pain in the singer's voices. I bet someone just died. Turning back to my papers, I sift through them and find my work form. I close my eyes and open them again to a mixed up jumble of words, and I begin to work.
Mother's POV
I read the paper over and over again to myself. It's a release form to allow my daughter to climb a mountain without any help or support from even safety cords. I stare down at the bottom of it, at my signature, in my neatest handwriting, because at that moment, I was thinking as hard as I have ever thought in my life, and probably as hard as I ever will.
My mind is racing, coming up with all the worst scenarios that could happen. But I have faith in my daughter, in her long, hard training. I know that she'll be able to make the climb, all the way to the top of the mountain. But at fourteen years old? At fourteen, I was still playing with straw dolls. No, wait, I should be happy for her. She's finally getting to live her dream. But isn't it a mother's right to worry?