The shove he felt between his shoulder blades was so abrupt and violent that he could do nothing but fall. The worst part of the entire experience was his complete ignorance of the large hole that lay before him. His hands, as a reflex, shot out in front of him but grasped only air until he hit the bottom, knocking the wind from his lungs. Normally, fresh earth has a somewhat pleasant smell, but this was different. The only word that came to his mind was death. Something else had died down here and its scent had seeped into the dirt directly beneath his face.
He curled into the fetal position and struggled to find a breath. With a gasp, he rolled onto his back and stared directly up, only to see a small white circle far, far above him. “Well, this isn’t good,” he thought. “That is a long way up.”
It was an empty silence in which he sat with only the ringing of his own ears to hear. There was no movement, no sound of dripping water, and no sign of life, even the bugs were strangely absent. He had been sitting up with his arms draped across his knees and he could feel the ache building up in his back. With a groan, he stood and walked in a very small circle, his arm span almost covering the distance from one edge to the next.
“It’s so dry down here,” he thought. “Very weird. It seems like a well but whoever dug it saw it go dry… apparently.” The dirt walls only created plumes of dust as he swiped his hand across them. He kicked around the bottom of the well hoping to find something, something, anything that could be used as a tool. His toe caught something and he uncovered a broken wine bottle. “Sweet, this is perfect. This would be much easier to dig if it wasn’t so dry.”
On his knees and digging with a small rock that he had nearly split his kneecap upon, he worked up a sweat and added a few drops of liquid to the tragically parched ground. Eventually exhuming the bottle, he was glad to see that it had, at some point in time, broken in half. The pointy edge of the bottle provided a great tool for scraping out a series of footholds in a stair step pattern.
Managing the first four toeholds, he struggled to create more as he held on with one hand and tried not to lose his foothold in the dry dirt. With one final lunge, he caught hold of the top edge of the ground outside and blinked aggressively to keep the dust and sweat out of his eyes. He managed to get both of his hands onto the lip above him and pull himself up onto one elbow. The dampness of the grass, the coolness of the air, and the smell of the forest around him reminded him just how beautiful life could be when not in isolation.
He dragged himself from his dry and dirty prison, to roll onto his back and stare up at a now black and starry sky. He tried to think back over the last several hours and for the life of him, he could have sworn that he was alone when he entered the forest.
“I hope my car is still there,” he thought. The setting of the sun made his journey through the forest that much more difficult but he had made several mental notes about his duration and direction earlier in the day.
A breath of relief escaped his mouth as he stepped on to the gravel of the parking lot to see his car where he had left it, but now alone in an empty parking lot. He started the engine and started driving. Still confused about how he had ended up in that hole in the first place.
Peering through one partially open eye, the sound of crunching gravel stirred him from his semi-conscious state. Staring at the edge of an even darker forest, he was irrationally moved to enter the darkness. Walking with a motivation even he didn’t understand, he once again found his former prison. He stood looking down at the hole and felt an all too familiar blow to the back to only come face to face with the smell of death in the dirt below.
“Well, this isn’t good,” he muttered. “This doesn’t make any sense. The bottle, look for the bottle.”
No comments:
Post a Comment