Cave Game

VIII - Soot

Alex remembered. Drifting through the haze of uncertainty, a shining beacon emerged. The light grew brighter and brighter, into the headlights of a truck. Clattering, it passed by, the workers in the back bouncing with the suspension as it bore down the rugged dirt track into the forest. As a kid, she would sit on the edge of the road at the end of the day, waiting for her father. Truck after truck of coal miners would roll by, and she would scan the faces of each of them, looking for her dad. Sometimes, the faces stared back. Often, they were doused in coal dust, making it so the only discernible feature were their eyes; stark white on black. Their headlamp helmets would bounce on their heads, the straps taken off after a laborious day for the journey home. Some of them carried equipment, like drills and pails and sledgehammers. But most carried pickaxes.

Using the planks for the head and the remaining two sticks she got above ground what seemed like eons ago, she formed the shape of the tool on the grid. Pulling her hands away, Alex watched as the materials melded together, the grain of the woods flowing into each other and intertwining like the bristles of two horse-hair brushes being pushed together. Each plank in the cubes layered on one another, like the flipping pages of a phone book. The newly formed handle wiggled its way through the wooden head of the tool, burrowing. It all compressed, and with a faint pop, a wooden pickaxe sat before the two.

"What..." Steve mumbled, fixated on the floating apparatus, scanning the length of the head. "I would've never thought of that."

"I don't know, it was just on my mind, so I thought 'what the hell,' and just, sorta..." she said insouciantly. Steve's mind was too busy to take notice of her blasé delivery, much more occupied with bushwhacking into unfamiliar logical territory. Each and every part of his head chopped away at dense veils, forming a rough cut path of deductions based on brash assumptions through a thick jungle of cognitive dysfunction. His roving pack of intrepid thoughts took logical leaps and bounds at every step, recklessly disregarding caution or care in where they landed. Eventually, without Steve knowing where they were going, his thoughts hit their mark and sent the rest of his dormant body whirring to life like some contrived autonomous mechanism, piloted by blindly courageous idiot savants.

He grabbed the pickaxe.

"Hey! I made that!" Alex said, her cool demeanor melting instantly.

Wordlessly, Steve searched the wall of the cave with his hand, sliding it across the bumpy, dusty stone. He looked at the pickaxe in his hand, pitifully insignificant in comparison to the immensity of the cave.

This is a child's toy, he thought. Pulling his hand back, he brought the head of the pick down into the face of the slate.

Crack!

The pickaxe clattered on the wall. The sound reverberated through the cave. Where it struck, fragmented chunks from the dent crumbled. The debris slid off in small, smooth chips, tumbling spasmodically through the air like feathers on the wind. The pickaxe shuddered in his hand, vibrations spreading down from the tip of the mattock to the handle in his grasp, through the wood grain, each and every fiber singing like a tuning rod.

Power coursed through the tool. He braced himself, using the whole of his body for the next swing.

Crack! Driving with his torso, Steve brought it down again.

Crack! Pounding. Rock fractured and crumbled.

Crack! David versus Goliath. Meager versus immense.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Steve and Alex exchanged glances. A block-sized hole had formed in the wall, and inside the crevice sat a pile of stones. they were neatly cobbled together into a cubic hunk, matching the shape of the hole. It spun around daintily, like a ballerina. Steve panted breathlessly, wiping sweat from his clenched brow as his shoulders heaved. His inhales were smooth and heavy like the stone around him.