‘Say we bury it?’ the old gravedigger rasped as his cigarette stained breath eked itself from his lungs and visibly fowled the surrounding air with an emphysemic wheeze, ‘I know a good place.’
The grey sun was setting upon the horizon with a tangible ambivalence toward yet another Tuesday–nothing good seemed to happen on a Tuesday. This was a terrible day, struck dour by the melancholy of work and further burdened by the failed potential of Monday; it fell into the calendar with a wet slap and then tracked its muddy footprints across the remaining week’s carpet, boring time outward and lingering unpleasantly for an extra hour or two around five o’clock.
What a disgusting day.
Two men considered their problem.
There are times in a person’s life in which a trial would present itself to be so obtuse that it would not only stump the surrounding fauna but further confuse existence enough that it forgets what to do after a full stop.
Problem solvers, people who would wallow in moments such as these, the bastards who seem to enjoy the pressures of being needed to think on the run; with grace and simplicity they can appraise any issue at hand and then invent solutions that can quickly be implemented.
It does seem, thought Alan as he distracted himself from his own circumstances with vacant wondering, that some people find problems just for their own jollies, quite selfish really.
Alan was a simple man of determined unimagination, so long as his cup was full and his enemy’s cup was not, Alan was happy–if it also came to be that their kitchen table had a bit of a wobble about one of its legs then all the better.
‘What we need,’ began the greenskeeper as he sat down on the grass and took off his cloth cap, ‘is either quite a good lie or to purchase the very-most expensive one way bus ticket that the conductor will sell us.’ It had been a long time that Allan was so thrown by something that he had to sit down and internalise his panic.
‘Perhaps we never woke up this morning, you know missed our alarms or somesuch,’ said the gravedigger as he lent on his shovel and lit a second cigarette with the dogend he was still smoking. ‘Happens a bit so I’ve heard. You remember Martin, the plumber? Well he missed his alarm for almost a week before he realised that someone had nicked his clock. How’s a man supposed to do his job will all these clock thieves about?’ Offering his mostly smoked cigarette to Allan, the old gravedigger took the opportunity to also take a seat on the grass as it looked like a sensible thing to do.
Nearby, the factory belched a steady plume of thick cloud up into the air as the drone of the distant electrical substation hummed loudly enough that its omnipresence became barely noticeable.
A pigeon, stuffed with bread from the bakery skip, drifted into the smoke plume under the brain addling malaise of still fermenting yeast. With a faint pop the idiot bird fully disappeared into the cloud bearing no trace but for a single slice of toast that lazily ejected some few seconds later.
‘Smokestack number one: t’was was white once, apparently,’ commented the gravedigger as he felt the moment needed an interjection of a fun-fact. ‘Me pap was a bricklayer when they were still constructing the stacks. He tol’ me that they started with two courses o’ brick and just kept walking around and around, laying as they went; said it was like the exact opposite of building a staircase.’
‘Oh, good…Wait how did he get down when it was finished?’ asked Allan through his hands, as he felt he needed to cradle his face in order to stop his brain from trying to run away.
‘Wouldn’t know, never saw him again, anyway what’s the go here? It’s getting a bit cold out.’
A pang of helplessness stuck Alan. He was happy for things to go wrong, in fact he regarded it as a part of life that most people hadn’t learnt to accept, but as he sat upon the grass and fretted he was seriously beginning to wonder why things always had to go wrong for him. He was a good man–well, good from the right angle anyway*–who only ever slighted those who really deserved it. He paid most of his taxes; he found that wallet once; and most of all he considered himself to always be thinking of others.
‘You know what really annoys me about people!?’ said Allan, his inflection so rhetorical it barely needed punctuation, ‘they’re always thinking about themselves. How am I getting out of this? How do I get to the library? It makes me sick!’ The stout legged greenskeeper had jumped to his feet and was now pacing a rut into the freshly cut lawn. ‘You know what? Maybe they won’t even notice.’
‘People usually notice things like this Allan,’
‘This is a safety hazard! Some crazed lunatic has let their dog roam the streets and I can’t be expected to watch where I’m mowing; it’s a union issue plain and simple. The whole thing, unions!’ snapped Allan, who in his frustration had kicked over three flower pots and was now eyeing off a gardenia.
‘It certainly is a mess-,’ began the gravedigger, ‘err- I mean problem.
In the far distance the wind carried a voice that vaguely called out the words, heeeere boy.
Eyes widening with the fresh terror of understanding, Allan grabbed the gravedigger by his shirt, ‘I have one question that is currently not only terribly important but quite the matter of urgency.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Do you have a second shovel?’
…
Elsewhere, a station worker paused a moment to shake life back into arms made weary from a day spent scraping coal from the inside of the smokestack.
Leaning against a wall he sighed an exhausted breath and looked into the swirling column of smoke that rose past him, alighting into the atmosphere above.
Scant moments before he was impacted by a truly unfortunate set of circumstantial detritus, the factory worker squinted upwards and thought to himself, what smells like a chicken sandwich?
*you just had to squint a bit and use most of your imagination.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 