I’ve been working on this story for a while now! And also it’s not done. And by working on I mean I’ve been sitting on it for two months. But I’m starting to finish it up and I thought I’d get the beginning onto here as a nice little teaser to the whole thing. It’s very consistent with a lot of other things I’ve been writing lately in that you can expect it to start sunny and rain quick. I’ve been feeling very dark lately. Hot Topic on wheels. Also this story is Not Funny.
STILL LIFE IN CAVE
In his bedroom upstairs Luke hunched with his shoulders wide over his keyboard. He tapped an even rhythm against the keys making progress in the wireframe system of caves he traversed. The desktop’s insides clicked and hummed in concurrence with his leisured taps. Leaning back into a deep stretch he let himself fall onto the bed behind him, burrowing his head into the comforter; stretched out then fetal, a bleating sheep in a bed of hay.
A clattering of pebbles hit against his barely open window and he half opened it and stuck out his head. Jimmy Collins and Little Michael Johnson stood with their arms wrapped around each other’s necks; they wooped and jumped at the emergence of Luke’s head.
“Have we got something to show you!”
“Luke! Do you have a flashlight?”
“And do you-”
“Or do you still have that headlamp?”
“That’s what I was going to ask!”
“The boys fell together into the grass in a mock fight to be the one to tell Luke what they’d discovered in the vegetation choked ravine that ran the side of their town. Luke was already lacing up his shoes and shifting through a shoebox for his headlamp, stumbling out the door with his jacket half on. He gave a shouted goodbye to whoever had the tv on in the family room. He wasn’t down the steps and already the headlamp’s light swung in sweeping arcs across the long shadows of the darkening lawn from its spot on his brow.
“Ok, so where are we going?” Luke asked.
Little Michael, who at ten was the youngest of the three, tooled in a tight circle on his bike. He stood tall on one pedal and leaned low into the curve.
“We found a cave!” He bugged his eyes out hard, a trick he’d learned from his older brother. “A big one!”
“It’s huge,” Jimmy added. “It’s really huge, Luke.”
“A real cave? Not just a big hole?” Luke asked. He thought back to the beginning of that summer and his steaming disappointment when a purported cave had turned out to be nothing more than a claustrophobic cement tunnel that Jimmy had stumbled across in the woods near his house.
“You still mad about that, Luke? I think if it’s dark enough I can’t see the end and the ground is wet it’s a cave. But don’t get mad again, this one is a real cave going deep down underground and everything!” Jimmy said.
“A real cave!” Luke felt the breeze against his sweating brow and reached up to take off the headlamp.
“Luke!” His mother called from behind the screen door. “Don’t go far. Dinner will be ready soon and Julia’s recital is tonight.”
“Mom, they found a cave! A real cave not far from here!”
“Dinner is in fifteen minutes,” She stood there a moment longer, looking past the boys toward the congealing red and white sun in the final throes of its setting.” A boy in my class disappeared on a field trip to the Miramec Caverns. They’re dangerous places. I’m not surprised you all found a cave but you stay out of it.”
Luke opened his mouth in protest but she’d already whirled back inside to set the table.
“We’ll have to go tomorrow, can’t miss Sunday dinner you know?” He said.
“Bah! You didn’t even try to argue with your mom! Me and Jimmy ain’t eating dinner any time soon, we’re going tonight without you! Gimme that headlamp!” Little Michael said.
Jimmy, though, was already pedalling home shouting about being hungry himself and going to the cave tomorrow. That the cave would be there tomorrow.
After dinner Luke powered on his desktop and sat barely breathing staring into the inky black of the monitor, unconsciously counting the ticks and whispers inside the tower. He’d managed to talk himself out of Julia’s piano recital by feigning too much homework. He had bought himself some time to play Unending Cavern.
Little Michael had found the cd-rom half buried in the fine dirt behind their junior high. An alley that ran between the main building and the gymnasium was an accidental wind tunnel and swirled the dirt into a visible vortex during the first month of school each year when August pulsed windy, dry, and hot. The disc had lay at an angle against the gym; it was just visible peeking from beneath a slope of chalky dirt.
Luke loved that it was found. He could wonder at its previous owner, finger each nick and ding at the disc’s edge. He could wander through the game, a crude wireframe of greens and blue-blacks meant to render the craggy edges and divots of a large cave, and in the space between the lines his mind would fill the gaps. The empty nothing was, once Luke fell into it, wet and warm. The inorganic geomoetry of the wireframe was more abstract and malleable than any fully realized artistic vision could be. Luke stretched out in the space; tonight he reveled in the warm languor of an uninterrupted expedition.
Traversing the cave was easy enough at the beginning, the path being wholly linear for the first hour or so of exploration. Through his headphones Luke could make out each knocking step he took, the far off dripping echoes of condensation slipping from stone, the whispered cracks of torches hissing against his jacket’s flapping breeze. It seemed strange to focus so much effort on varied and realistic sounds when the game’s graphics were so basic. The sounds, Luke realized, were there to fill in between the lines. The ambiguity of an unseen noise was not a hindrance to his own personal world building like they might have been in a more graphically realized setting. They did not preconceive; they gave him room to run and were tools when he listened close enough.
A sound is personal, he thought. A sound is open to interpretation. He smiled thinking of Julia pointing into a field of tall corn near their house when they were younger.
“The crickets sound like marbles,” She had said, gesturing toward the chirping expanse of the corn field. “Like marbles being dropped.”
“I think they’re like a baseball card in a bike wheel.” Luke remembered saying.
“You’re thinking of a cicada.”
“I might be thinking of a cicada,” He had said, conceding to Julia.
Back in the cave Luke came to a fork in the path, the first choice he had been presented with since beginning his exploration. He sat back in his chair and stretched his arms overhead with a moaning yawn. This seemed like a good place to stop for the night. Before he quit, he stood at the mouth of each path and listened. To the right a low rushing, maybe running water. To the left was static silence. He strained to hear anything beside the hiss of grey noise, inching forward both in his chair and in game.
Tapping the escape key he quit to the desktop. He powered off the computer and wished he’d heard something to the left. He wished he had heard someone calling for help or the rumble and scrape of some evil thing gnawing at the cave walls. He didn’t feel so ambitious as to admit to needing a purpose but he thought before he fell asleep that he’d see what that rushing sound was tomorrow. And there was always the real cave to explore. His mother couldn’t find out but there was a real cave to explore. Luke would at least stick his head inside and shout.
Ludopoetry 