‘These stairs are going to be the death of me today’, said Martin as his mind and body unified toward the idea of a ten minute break.
Part-way through an explorative stretch the old labourer began to cough in pain as he reached upward and tried to twist some of the stiffness out from his lower back.
‘Fatigue will be the thing that kills you mate, the stairs are just facilitating it,’ Blake replied,accidently dropping his barrel to the floor hard enough that he didn’t have to look down to know that he’d just cracked a tile. ‘Err, how many more trips do we have to make?’
‘Only one or two, maybe a couple of several, but it’ll be fun, teamwork,’ Martin’s emphasis on the word Teamwork unsettled Blake in a way that he found hard to internalise. ‘I think I may have stuffed my back though, I’ve never been able to feel my spine rub against my lungs before, mind if we stop for a smoke?’
Falling down with the grace of a paralised swan, Martin slumped against the metal handrail that wound its way up the staircase and toward the roof of the silo.
Leaning his neck back over the rail, Martin heard several cracks that, to his weary brain, were remedial or possibly quite terminal. Testing his toes with a cautionary wiggle, the labourer pulled a crushed cigarette packet from his top pocket and struck a match on the barrel of water.
Milford Grain, a company whose struggles in adapting to the industrial age had led to five of their first grain silos erupting into flame, had begrudgingly assembled a health and safety division to oversee the construction of their much vaulted prototype, Silo Number Six.
Believing that a smaller, more powder-based, grain would burn less, and that dry milling as much air into the silo as possible would delay the outbreak of combustion. The saftey office organised construction to begin with the corperate efficiency of a get well soon card. Soil was turned; hands were shook; and a myriad of diffrent awards were all handed out in celebration of their very clever idea.
One year after losing silo number six to fire, the safety office then implemented a water extinguishing system into their design that would eliminate fire spread instantly, by way of thirty barrels of water all sitting in a small room constructed somewhere above the historically flammable grain below.
‘What’s in these barrels anyway,’ asked Blake as he wiped away some sweat with his cloth cap and chewed at the end of his pipe, ‘they weigh near as much as a sleeping mule after he gets into the turps.’
‘What?’
‘Hmm?’
Martin was unsure if he should pursue the statement further so he extinguished his match and paused for a moment.
‘I’ve heard it’s for some kind of fire depression or some-such system,’ he said, exhaling a thick plume of home grown tobacco smoke. ‘It apparently makes a raincloud when a fire breaks out; veryhigh concept they say, all the rage in Germany.’ Resting his foot against the barrel Martin began to push against it slightly, testing its weight and hoping that it had somehow become lighter in the last two minutes.
‘I’d imagine that would make it scientific then,’ asked Blake, with notes of distrust ebbing into the moustached corners of his ragged jawline.
‘I suppose so, but couldn’t say how it works myself.’
Spitting, Blake gave the barrel a sharp kick and threw an imaginary handful of salt over his left shoulder, ‘nothing good has come from science; smarter men than you and I dabble and tinker with what’s normal, and then try to fix it until it’s broken. We had the wheel, and it was fine, then science comes along, with its cubes and its angles and suddenly letters are numbers and everyone cares about some square triangle for no reason! My pap built his house without any of that, and is it still standing? Yes! And I’d like to see a scientist do the same. Brick and timber that what I-’
By this stage Martin had stopped listening to his fellow labourer’s rant and began to wonder why people kept building silos in general; they seemed to always be blowing up, so why keep making them? Wouldn’t it be easier to just give everyone some fresh grain and have it catch fire in smaller piles? People could even store it in their kilns.
‘-and don’t get me started on modern buttresses!’
Blinking out of his daydream Martin looked to Blake and smiled.
‘Trust me I wont. Anyway, let’s get back to work, I’m ready for either a beer, someone to bear a child, or to lose an arm in the process.’ Laughing, Martin slowly stood up and flicked the still embering dogend over the edge of the stairwell.
Life is full of follies.
Mistakes that maketh and undoeth men, along with all the facets of good intention, can come crumbling downward under the guiding hand of a true ignoramus.
As Martin casually tossed his half smoked cigarette into the enclosed mound of freshly milled grain, his name was forever etched into the precautionary legend of both alcoholics and teetotalers alike; with only the aid of gravity and the rapid combustion of ariated kindling, A simple farm hand, with lofty ideas of exploring the world, became but a mist on the wind, a wide distribution of atoms that danced and mingled upon the still quivering kilometer radius, surrounding what was once a grain silo.
In a field, now verdant with wheatgrass and smelling vaguely of ozone, you may find the buried traces of a foundation disassembled, one sundered from it former heritage; and above, somewhere whinin the boundless heavens that mankind may never touch, you may see this old building’s roof; and you may think to yourself for a moment, how up might something go before it not come down again?
Ascending…forever ascending.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 