Listen to the author reading this story:
The locals call it The Fill.
It usually goes like this: some obnoxious guy arrives thinking he can take on the mountain. Last year it was Jake. Jake with the custom-made snowboard. Top of the range Jakey-boy; legend: GoPro, kit and kaboodle, ego and ignorance, that Jake, you know the kind.
The locals said no. The mountain didn’t want it. And if Jake wouldn’t listen to the mountain or to the locals, then at least he should listen to the weather reports. Storms a-coming. Big winds a-rising. There would be avalanches.
Not could be. Would be.
The last chairlift had gone up and down, the authorities said: out of the question. But Jake convinced a helicopter pilot to take him to the top – hard cash, and plenty of it, is mightily persuasive.
The mountain didn’t like that very much.
The mountain had absolutely no interest in being featured on YouTube.
The first twenty meters of his descent went smoothly. Then the rumble began, nothing massive to begin with, just the mountain shaking itself awake. Then winds, the big ones that were prophesized, they whipped vengeful, and the mountain range began its mountain rage.
The slope itself rose slowly, snow swelling into something amorphous and huge with icy breath. It pressed against the snowboarder, slapped hard, and when he opened his mouth aghast, it poured right in, down his throat, choking, filling, freezing innards instantaneously.
His brain was the last to go. It was still ticking for a few seconds as its clock ran down… regretting? Shamefully regretting? It’s what the mountain would’ve wanted.
The winds were not finished with him though. They lifted him up and slammed his body against a tree. The branches, neatly, poked right through his eye sockets, and the two white eyeballs at the tips of the branches were like Christmas tree baubles, glistening, dripping red, a red that was redder because of the snow. Later, small birds feasted on them.
Jake was solid, blue, unrecognizable, before anyone found him. The search, someone said, hadn’t been all that thorough, or hurried. There seemed to be more interest in his camera, and how – smashed lens aside – it had miraculously survived. What was taken from the camera went viral, naturally, and YouTube viewers were in their millions. The comments section was full of braggadocio boys who were eyeing it all up as a challenge, and will no doubt be heading there next year to see if they fare any better.
The mountain will be waiting.
Colin O’Sullivan is an Irish writer living in Japan. He is the author of seven acclaimed novels. His debut novel, Killarney Blues, won the prestigious “Prix Mystere de la critique” in 2018. His novels have been translated into French, Russian, Turkish and Japanese. His third novel became the hit Apple TV show “Sunny” starring Rashida Jones. His tense lyrical thriller Maiko Moans was published in April 2025.
