Feb. 24 - written by Christopher Rohan

Week 12

2-18-22 - Prompt: Triceratops

Tremors of impending doom shook the earth. The great beast approached the berm, intent on leveling all before it.

“Ay, Randy,” shouted the foreman’s voice over the radio, “keep that dozer close to the floor or else we’ll have to come back and level it again.”

“You got it boss,” Randy replied. He hated it when the boss micromanaged. He glanced over at the job site. He’d just have to even the grade here and his work was finished. That was the problem. He loved a good day of hard work, but the union rules stated that he’d have to stay within his wheelhouse. He was the bulldozer driver and that’s all he’d do until he signed up for something else.

“Maybe the boss will let me tag along with someone for a bit,” he thought with vain hope.

It took only another two hours to finish off the work and he parked the dozer out of the way. It was a dry day and his clunky boots crunched over hardened clay soil up to the foreman’s trailer. He knocked before swinging the door open.

“Berm’s all leveled, boss.”

“Huh? Oh, good, good,” said a chubby man with thick glasses and a bald head.

“Is there anything else I can work on?” Randy’s ask was familiar to the man, and the foreman looked up with some irritation.

“Randy, you know the rules.”

“Yeah, sir, but I just want to work.”

“I know.”

“Is there another position that I can train for that can give me more hours?”

“Maybe,” conceded the man, “but let’s talk about that on Monday.”

“Ok, yeah …’ Randy started, but a commotion had started outside. Both men listened, hearing muffled yells and shouts as machines were silenced. The two men rushed outside to see the commotion.

Men were running over from everywhere to look into the pit being dug by the excavator. Randy made his way up to the edge as all the men look and saw, protruding form the bottom, two massive bones.

2-21-22 - Prompt: Forgiveness

“I’ve lived far too long,” the elder whispered. His body was stretched along a hard frame of wood lashed together with reeds.

“What did you say, grandpa?” a young girl asked the old man irreverently.

“Oh, my dear Junie, I didn’t see you there,” he replied with a slight turn of his head. Anything more would be shooting pain through the old and worn body. “What are you doing here?”

“Mama asked me to stay while she got some water,” she said between hums, “but what do you mean, ‘too old?’”

“Oh, child, you are young and almost never run out of energy. I am old and never seem to have enough. Oh that I had used better what time I was given.” His words began to fade into memories.

“What would you do differently?’ the child asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” he began with a weary crack in his voice, “I think I’d start with having been a better dad to your mother. She dealt with much and I wasn’t here often. Then, I’d have been a better man to the town. I think I dealt too greedily. I made too many decisions for me.”

“The people like you. I don’t think they’d like you if you did I a bad job, and mama tells me all the time that she is so glad to have a dad like you. I think you are a very good grandpa.”

His old eyes began to fill with tears. “Why are you so nice to me?” he asked.

“Because you’ve been so nice to me. I learned it from you.”

“I do not think you’d be so nice if you knew all of it. I am not so nice a man as you think.”

“Why would you say that?” a strange sort of wonder filled her face as she asked.

“Many bad decisions,” he said shaking his head in shame, “if the people like me, they must not know.”

The girl, no older than ten, looked at her grandpa with the sort of pity that the strong have for the weak, and said, “Perhaps, grandpa, they did see, but love you anyway.”

“Then that is very foolish of them,” he seemed resolved to despise himself.

The girl looked at her grandpa and was angry. She could not stand the injustice of a good man going punished by no one but himself. In reverence she yelled, “Or perhaps you’re the fool for not forgiving your own wrongs. The people that were hurt already have, but you won’t, thinking yourself unforgivable.”

2-23-22 - Prompt: Dark

Art couldn’t tell if he was awake or sleeping, but the sharp pain in his head wasn’t a dream. He blinked and rubbed his eyes but nothing changed. He felt disoriented and woozy and knew that if he could see anything it would be spinning.

“Ricky?” he said in the darkness and his voice bounced off nearby walls. Nothing replied except the beating of his own heart and the slight shuffle of his nervous feet on the gritty floor. He began to feel around.

He’d been leaning against a hard and knobby wall and as he sat up he could feel the soreness of where the knobs had dug into his back. Leaning forward onto his knees, he rubbed and stretched the soreness away, then carefully started feeling the floor before him. Pebbles, and dust covered an otherwise smooth surface that felt a lot like metal.

He continued forward on hands and knees until he came across the familiar touch of rubber and canvas, tube socks and jeans. The picture of his twin brother flashed through his mind and he quickly said again, “Ricky?”

No reply. “Ricky! he shouted and it shocked him to hear his voice so close.

“Just five more minutes, Art,” Ricky mumbled back and rolled over.

Art laughed and shook his head the way brothers do and was glad that he was ok. “Hey, come on,” he said, shaking him awake, “it’s time to get up.”

A shuffling in the dark and a yawn bigger than a boy Ricky’s size told Art that he was up.

“Art?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you mind hitting the lights?”

“I’d love to, but I’m not sure where we are,” Art said with a nervous laugh as he couldn’t recall what brought them to that dark place.

“Oh, well, we were chasing after that kid, the one who took the tools from Uncle Ron’s shed.” Ricky began recalling.

“Yeah, we followed him to that old barn, but where are we now?”

2-24-22 - Prompt: Grate

Steve had lost count of the grated metal steps he’d been climbing in the cold, dark silo. One thousand eight hundred and sixty three was the last number he’d counted, but he couldn’t recall which step it was. It kept his mind away from the noises he was hearing, but the closeness of the last howl shook him.

He was tired and felt like he couldn’t go on, but the fright of what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, in the shadows below pushed him up, up, always up.

The steps were precarious. Rusted and crumbling bones of a concrete carcass. It was fascination that brought him this deep and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been down in the complex. He’d been investigating the presence of mid-twentieth century Europeans in South America and knew of the history of post World War II German immigration to Argentina, but oddly, this structure predated that migration and resembled the First World War construction, but on a scale far surpassing the likes of the era. He also found it in the jungles of Peru. 

None of it made sense. There was no European presence here as far as any history was concerned, but here he was, at the center of the mystery. He glanced at his watch, a habit of his that had no purpose since he’d broken it on the way down. He stopped to catch his breath and looking up, he saw a small pinpoint of daylight. It was enough to illuminate the room since his eyes had adjusted to the dark below. The stairs wrapped the wall of the huge octagonal cylinder, spiraling. 

“Not far now,” he said to himself in exasperation. He bent and heaved his lungs. “Keep going,” he finally said between breaths and he took the next step and the next, at a pace that he hadn’t realized was considerably slower than what he’d been doing.

The steps below him groaned as he heard dust and rubble crumble. He hadn’t noticed when it stopped, but the whoops and howls couldn’t be heard. It was the first moment in his ascent of silence, and the silence filled him with dread. Behind him he heard a low rumble in the shadows.