Day 3

No time to write to you!  Did stay true to my word on Day 3 though.  Unfortunately, it was raining too hard to run outside today (my excuse).  It's important to test your mental and physical limits every day, not just one or the other.  So, my writing might not be up to snuff.  But I did do 1000+ words.  That's what counts.

            It lived in that hole.  Nothing else lived in there.  At a time it seemed like nothing could live in there at all.  The reeds jutted up from impossible angles.

            “Ain’t nothing in that pit but eels,”  Uncle Smokestacks adjusted his straw hat and stood directly above the pit.  “If you lost a dog down there, that thing is as good as gone.”

            George took this with a grain of salt.  Smokestack was a great man, but he was readily dismissive.  George looked down at his hand, still holding the leash, the collar ripped like a loose noose.  Bending down to look past the rocks, he saw if he only went undereath the bridge and climbed down by the banks of the river he might get a better look. 

            “Thanks for the help, pops,”  He said.  He knew he was going to have to get his hands dirty this morning.  And I just bought these pants, he thought. 

            It happened like this.  George hastily made the decision to not get married, and instead moved into a lone camper on his southern relatives land.  His family was surely going to side with his fiancee about the matter, she was the bread winner and pants wearer in the relationship.  George didn’t care for his parents much either way, and it wasn’t until he tried living alone that he realized he could do it.  Ol Uncle Smokestack would help him out with dinner every night, and he had plenty of time to 

            The noon sun rose over head.  Really a beautiful peace of land, George thought to himself taking a deep breath of salty lake air in.  Kind of a malformed, asymmetrical lake his lot had come into, but the weather was agreeable enough and they were miles from the nearest city.

Uncle Smokestack had returned to his tractor work, but was using the wooden pole end of a broom to unlodge something from the motor of it.  George could hear him cursing at himself under his breath, in a squat position not able to fully commit to going down on one knee.  He jarred whatever it was clogging the thing loose, and George sighed with relief when it wasn’t his four legged friend.

The bank descended sharply, and George tried to keep up.  Half running and half trying not to fall on sticks and rocks, he came to realize if he DID fall there was no way to catch himself.  He’d splatter on the hard earth like scrambled eggs.  Once his life was done flashing before his eyes, he found himself upright at the bottom.  Like the moment Road Runner would stop for a second to say “beep beep”.  Regaining his composure, he heard a soft gutteral bark emanating from the rocks. 

Winslow, his only friend, was wedged between two sharp rocks.  It looked like he was stuck in a chimney.  Paying little attention to where he was going, George stubbed his big toe on a pointy rock.  While he was pretty sure his sock would be soaked with blood, he was worried Winslow would have trouble breathing in his tight fix.

George grabbed the little cocker spaniel by his front paws and proceeded to pull.  This dog is going to give out far before the rocks do, George thought to himself.  He thought of going up to the barn and retrieving some tools to assist himself, but the ascent looked even more perilous.  These rocks were firmly in place, this dog isn’t going anywhere.

He called out to Uncle Smokestacks in vain.  He pictured his Uncle riding through the fields, already completely oblivious to the dog situation.  The old man obviously wouldn’t be any help.

George weighed the options in his mind.  Pulling too hard could result in the dog losing some of its skin.  He pictured Winslow’s skeleton escaping its shell, and himself sitting here at the bottom holding its carcass like a broken pinata.  Even if he were to get a chisel ot hammer, taking any wack at these rocks would inevitably cause the formation to collapse in on itself.  Hearing Winslow weasing again, he decided to throw caution to the wind.

He gave a hard tug again and the dog came loose.  It slipped out like falling out of a trapdoor.  It shook itself off, tested out each paw for breaks like Tom Arnold in True Lies when he thinks he got shot, and was ready to go. 

“We got no leash, buddy,”  George looked directly into Winslow’s eyes.  “You had better avoid any pits this time around.” 

The dog stared up at George, obviously not contemplating a word.  Relief, as usual, leaves us prone to accidents.  Sauntering along with its butt up in the air, the dog immediately found a new hole to fall into.  As the dog fell through, the hole steadily expanded, like ice on a lake when the temperature rises.  The hole steadily made its way over to the lake, gobbling up water into an undeground cavern. 

Grabbing onto a nearby root extending from the quarry, George managed to grab the dog by its mid section and book it up the hill like a All Pro running back.  The lake disappearing like Christopher Columbus’s edge of the world nightmare.  There’s a difference between edge of the world and end of the world.  Finding a spot under a tree, George sat sprawled out with the dog next to him.  A loud sucking noise enveloped the area.

Later that night, it was showing no signs of letting up.  All of the water had been sucked up, and the mud from the lake floor was unsettled and crumbling into itself.  George had relocated with Ol Uncle Smokestack to the top of a nearby hill.  Smokestack stood with his hands on his hips, with an expression like a dog that had just seen a cat for the first time. 

“I knew there was something was not right with that lake,”  Said Smokestack.  “Me, living up here by my lonesome, I just the same kept away from it.  It’s bad news, that lake.”

The rocks stood unaffected above the cavern like an avante garde art project.  Somewhere there were humans dying to take credit for it.  The whole thing looked like a sculpture, propped upright like a third arm coming out of a stomach.  The cavern, like a lower stomach armpit, was shrouded in a dark mist on the inside.