A Climber's Taunt - The Legend of Tiara Girl

One day; a day when the crowds were thin at the famed Metro Rock climbing gym in Everett, Massachusetts; a lazy Sunday when the clouds were low over the sky and the wind chill dipped below thirty degrees in January; a day when no member of the MassClimbers climbing group felt the need to risk life and limb by scaling the most difficult routes in the gym, a birthday was held. And who could the honor of such an annual event be bestowed upon but a little girl, no older than five or six, sporting a chest harness, tiny climbing shoes that would make anyone swoon at the thought of once being young, a pink tutu and a fake diamond-encrusted tiara.

In a climbing gym she was, but climb she did not. Having tested herself on many of the challenging and, due to her appropriate size for her age, low-hanging bouldering problems, she found the only way to truly challenge and exhaust herself was to run around in circles being chased, nay followed, by her gang of squealing admirers. They found in thier excitement the joy of leaping face-first onto the soft, blue mats and the pleasure of swinging freely on the ropes that were not being used to challenge lesser people; those whom she laughed at as they attempted, ungracefully, to layback on a hold that was clearly meant to be used as a mantle.

The passive-aggressive little bitch that she was, she snidely ignored the climbers' grunts, pants and screams by brushing past the belayor's legs, letting him or her know that, despite her indifference, they were still in her presence and should not forget her due dominance of the air that we breathed and the playful voices that we heard. And somewhere, somewhere in the cruel state of denial, where the holds were as valuable as foreign letters and the steepness of the slope that she would walk up (without a rope) pulled back with all of Einstein's theories of gravity in full use, was a ghostly voice emenating from both Hell below and Heaven above taunting, "COME ON YOU PUSS! I DID THAT IN LESS THAN TEN SECONDS, WITH MY EYES CLOSED, ONE HAND TIED TO THE OPPOSITE ANKLE, A BUCKET OF HOT TAR BEING DUMPED OVER ME FROM THE TOP AND AN ARMY OF SPEARMEN HURLING THIER LONG, SHARP WEAPONS AT MY HEEL." We'd look around and see nothing; not a single sign of a humanly presence that could have possibly said such things. We'd look again, our belayor's wondering what was wrong with us, why our fright-stricken, white faces looked so perplexed. And just as we'd get ready to turn our focus back on the climb, off in the distance, a sound would be heard, a sound of a giggling girl in a pink tutu and a tiara taunting us every move therefore after.