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TRU MineCraft

For two years I never truly saw the sun. I was in the mine before it came up, and not out again until after it fell for the evening. My complexion suffered horribly. I began to crave the comfort of our bathroom heat lamp.

My best friend throughout was Paul, who went with me neck and dirty neck, every inch down through the coal dust that coated our bodies. The soot grew so thick at times you were overwhelmed no matter how many years you’d got used to it. You could get accustomed to breathing it, and accustomed to blinking out the big bits, but when it caught you right in the eye it was unavoidable pain and then you had to take a moment to get on up out of the pit and walk down either to the hose or you had a bottle with you if you were smart.

I came to Pennsylvania not to marry myself to the mountains, or the people. I was traveling, the nicer way in those days that I referred to my being unemployed. I’d caught a train from out of Jersey and got spooked somewhere along the line at 5AM by the cracks of the bull sticks close at hand. I don’t care how low I get, but I’ll never join up with those men.

Sunup found me a road, and I was lucky it was summer so that I could buy a bit of fresh food and find a nice place to sleep right outside town. At the saloon was where I met Jim Deevers, who was mine boss at the time.

Then I met Clara, and had a reason to come back out of those pits everyday. Which, ironically, sent me back into them for longer, in an effort to work our way out of this.

This morning I had grit in my coffee. But I won’t blame any one specific thing for what’s happened. Not the pebble in my eye on the elevator, or the stubbed toe. It was just a shitty day all round. You know the type. The ones where you just wish you’d stayed in bed and waited for tomorrow. But then where does that leave you? If you start listening to those sorts of voices, then who knows how long you’ll hang about in your pajamas.

So, no, I don’t blame the new guy for putting a bit too much powder in the charge. It sat there for five days and who knows why today was the day it got picked up, except for the fact that, again, it’s just one of those days.

I sit in constant darkness with Paul. We don’t speak. We don’t move. Our backs are flat against the wall of the tunnel. On the other side of this collapse they are drilling feverishly towards us, and this comes across to us in here like the sound of a small gnat buzzing just behind your ear, right where you’d like to slap it but you can’t get there fast enough.

Dipping in and out of sleep from the darkness and the not talking and the not moving, you sometimes snap out of it and think to grab the bug which is making this noise; and then the at-turns-dry/at-turns-sticky sensation of real fortune sinks in and you remain fast where you are, breathing shallow, trying not to panic.

Trying not to think about what’s just beyond your hands if only you reached out, if only you turned on the light.

“I think the one thing that I’d like to most tell the world was that I loved a woman. Not terribly perfectly, but flawed and honest and true. She was my saving grace, I am not ashamed to admit. And if I die in service to that grace, I will have died a good man.”

I am whispering this aloud. “Shhh,” Paul hisses for me to be quiet. The whine of the drill and the blackness is all there is.

Tagged: prose fiction