Oran

[Aesopian 1125]

 

Schkrit... schkrit... schkrit...

The chisel ate against the wall, leaving behind a single irregular gash. It was lost the moment I looked away, tangled in a web of thousands of them. The walls were crisscrossed with countless marks, each a single cut into stone. Like a fingerprint, pressed, over and over, into ink and then onto paper. This was my print impressed upon the world. The squeak of metal came, and another mark was left.

 

The stone gives way over time, if you spend long enough at it, much like dirt. As a child, I remember digging holes in the fields of my parent's estate. Little clumps of soil, crumbling from its walls, just the same as the pebbles ground down by hours of rubbing on stone.  

 

The hole stretched backwards, farther than the light of my lantern would carry. The single candle inside sputtered against the darkness, molten wax oozing into a mound at the bottom of its rusted iron container. The light is my angel, protecting me from the blackness that could swallow me up if it were to go out. 

 

When I was a humble seminarian, the school would send us occasionally on trips to assist in raising churches for new communities. I became good at it, I think, I was always handy with tools. Fastidiousness, hard-work, these were virtues, and I would be virtuous, I would tell myself. There was nothing different about the latest raising, until I woke up to a commotion. 

 

There was a miracle: God has told our bishop that the chapel would not stand until a living man was buried below the foundations. He told me that I was chosen for this monumental task, and that I would go below the earth and become the one to build our future. I remember seeing my brothers for the last time, but their faces have melted into a pale, amorphous mass. I remember the heat of the sun leaving me for the last time, and the last smell of air before there was only stone. 

 

Sometimes, I can the see the glint of a man in the stone who I do not recognize. He has long, hanging jowls, a face piled with wrinkles shoveled on by time. His lips are parched and cracked, speckled with stone. A scraggly white beard hangs low from around them. The eyes are sunken, depressed into his skull like there was nothing behind them. Dull-blue pupils gawk out senselessly at the world. Each eye is bordered by a heavy, bushy grey brow. He is bald, but long drags of filthy, tattered hair run down from his temples and occiput to his shoulders, like the hair of horses. His skin is a sickly tan-amber, from a people used to bright sun, but now sucked of its color by time spent in the dark. He is dirty, dusty, desperately in need of a bath. He is hungry, thirsty, and alone. 

 

My hands look so old when I see them by the glint of the candle, calloused into wads of skin. I imagine it is like the hands of a mole. The metal of my chisel is a single scratching talon, worn down to bare but a stub. My beard is whiskers. I think that I am like the mole of God, digging his kingdom out of the earth. 

 

When I lick my lips, it tastes dry as rock. I lick the wall, and it tastes the same, that is how I know.

 

I couldn't say how long I've been down here. There is no sun or moon, only me. Sleep is irregular, it comes in fits and bursts. Even then, the dreams are so often of this place, I'm not even sure if I am awake, now. It feels like I wake up, and the chisel is already in my hand against the wall. So, I just keep cutting. 

 

I have to, I must. Unto eternity.

 

God wills it.

 

Schkrit... schkrit... schkrit...

[Reckless Banzai Screamer 11952]