The Pole Shift

Sean begins to change

It wasn't much fun getting drunk when it seemed to strangle you with guilt. It felt very wrong to be supplied with alcohol by a system that was suppose to benefit mankind. Was he an experiment? Were his actions being analysed to see how crap people could be? It just didn't feel right and he hoped  Macka or Prophet or whatever it was didn't respond to his voiced desire for vodka again. He felt the slightest bit of suspicion that he had been taught a lesson, had they predicted his guilt at the gift of alcohol, did they know it would nudge him in a different direction? Like a father making a son smoke a whole packet of cigarettes as punishment for puffing on one.

                It was a strange couple of weeks. Sally was watching him, he would see her face peering at him from above the fence. Tom and his fat brother and even the brats were very quiet. He felt no desire for interaction with his ex wife, apart from shrugging his shoulders at her and yelling "What?!"  Instead his eyes would scan the woods at the back, hoping to see Lett. She was strong, she had purpose, he felt like he would like to be on her side in some way. He sighed, down on himself. If he wasn't getting drunk he was yearning for a woman he hardly knew. Why couldn't he just get a plan together instead of moping? It was almost as if to get things done he had to face a catastrophe to make him, given choice he would lumber around. A tremor raced across the land, he hardly registered it, only to wish that the big one would come.

                 One thing he thought he could do was perfect a sling shot. He sat down at the table clear headed for once and measured out the surgical tubing. He found some metal he bent into shape with a vice. It was ugly, but the fork was evenly spaced and of the same size. He wound ducting tape around the handle for grip, then attached the tubing on with a reef knot, the only knot he remembered from childhood. Then he attached the tube through a piece of leather, shaped like a peel of orange. It looked, functional.

                 Outside he found some small pebbles, he really wanted ball bearings but they were unavailable online, ammunition he thought, ball bearing were a part of weaponry.  He stretched the half inch diameter surgical cord so the leather pouch touched his chin, he aimed at the woods. The pebble flew fast and hard, striking a mountain ash then ricocheting away, still at speed. "Whoa." He said like a teenage boy. He set up a plastic bucket at the top of the garden, and began to take it apart with pebbles. So absorbed with it that noon passed and the afternoon wanned before he sat his weapon down. His hand was blistered, and Sean felt proud. A bow he thought, I should learn how to make a bow.