Plan Of The Peak Cavern by Emily Temple, 2019
The magic trick:
Pulling both of the story’s perspectives further into the weird and cosmic as the characters descend further into the cavern
Parallel lines today on the magic tricks website. “Peak Cavern” gives us two narratives at once. Or I guess it’s actually just one narrative, but with two very different perspectives.
The first perspective gives us the fairly mundane concerns of a young tour guide leading a group through a cavern. The second is that of an older blind woman on the tour – complete with (gimmicky?) interior monologue presented as backward text.
The woman’s thoughts are on a much more philosophical level than those of the tour guide. Frankly, they could be described as weird.
So while the two characters barely interact, their dual interior monologues do seem to affect each other. As the blind woman’s thoughts get increasingly cosmic, the boy begins to consider all sorts of things outside his original realm of surface concerns – all while the group descends further and further into the cave, which by the way doesn’t seem to exist anymore in the way it was mapped and also possibly might be a womb.
It’s a wild story, rich in potential meanings.
And that’s quite a trick on Temple’s part.
The selection:
Evan knows he should approach the blind woman himself, but for some reason he finds that she makes him nervous. The large black glasses are like wards, or like the inversion of a mask. Masks, it turns out, are in the rare category of things that are pretty much the same inside-out. Even inside-out and backwards.
“She can’t pick that up,” Evan says.
“It looks like she can,” the little girl’s father says. “But—Mirabella, put it down.”
The little girl puts the no gum-chewing sign back on the ground, turning it the wrong way. Evan imagines what she’ll look like when she grows up. Fat, he thinks.
Evan clears his throat. “Follow me,” he says. He gestures for the group to follow. A gesture like slinging a body over his shoulder, he has always thought.
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