11/18/2010

 
Dust blew over the town, as it always did whenever there was a slight breeze or even when a cat with allergies walked by. There wasn’t much to impede it from doing so, spare a rickety sign that stood, barely, next to the dirt road leading into town. The town’s inhabitants had just learned to deal with it, and how to dress so the thin layer of red dirt (that would undoubtedly cover them by the end of the day) would compliment their entire ensemble.

Sable Shepherd attempted to close his mouth before he got a side of dirt to go with his breakfast, but he did so too late. There was now a layer of earth-toned grit covering his teeth. He spent the next few seconds trying to wipe all of it off by furiously rubbing his finger against them while simultaneously trying to prevent any further dirt invasion.

The breeze had died down completely by the time he had reached the sign at the edge of town. Old Man Joe was sitting in his rocking chair next to it, his shotgun resting on his lap. Sable had never really seen the point of Joe’s shotgun. Beside the fact that there was really no reason for anyone, whether it be looters or random passersby, to enter the town, the shotgun looked as if it would fall to pieces if someone even thought about pumping it.

“Sable, my boy!” Joe shouted obnoxiously loudly when Sable got next to him. “Glad you could make it down!”

“It’s really not that big of a deal, Joe,” Sable said modestly.

“No really it is!” Joe said. “Young boy like you’s got lots to do, being so young and all. I’m flattered that you’d walk yourself all the way out of the way down here to help out an old bastard like me.”

“Really, Joe, I literally live not even three hundred yards away from this very spot,” Sable said, pointing at his rickety shack of a house not even three hundred yards away.

“That’s your place?” Joe asked as if it was the first time he’d done so.

“I come out here every week and tell you with absolute certainty, that I live not three hundred yards away,” Sable said, slightly annoyed. “Every week, Joe.”

“You didn’t come down last week,” Joe argued. Despite the fact that he’d actually come over twice the week before, Sable decided any ensuing argument would likely bear a resemblance to someone smashing their forehead repeatedly into a brick wall.

“What do you need me to do?” Sable asked, crowbarring the conversation in a completely new direction.

“Sign’s broken again,” Joe said. Sable walked out in front of the sign to see it in the exact same condition it had been in the last time he’d seen it. It was a few pieces of wood lazily nailed together with “Stae owt u stooped bastards” written across it in white paint. It was about as intimidating as the geriatric man with a severe case of dementia that stood guard next to it with a rusty, likely self-destructing firearm, which was to say not at all.

Every time Joe had told him that the sign was broken, Sable had to restrain himself from asking if that had anything to do with its message or at least the general omission of any particular lexicon. He’d always found it beyond strange that Joe had little to no grasp of the written English but had somehow learned to spell a word as long as “bastard” perfectly.

Sable gave the sign an expert’s glance, feigning that he was actually putting serious thought into what was wrong with it. After a few seconds, he crossed his arms and stroked his chin to further sell his dedication.

“I think I see what’s wrong with it,” he lied. He pulled a hammer out of his bag and walked behind the sign so that Joe could only see his body from the waist down. Sable smacked the back of the sign in a random spot thrice. It did nothing to help the sign, in fact all it really could have done was weaken the wood, but all Sable really needed to do to convince Joe that he’d fixed the sign was to act like he was doing something a legitimate repairman might do.

“There,” Sable announced as he put his hammer away and dusted off his hands. “Good as new.”

“Don’t know what I’d do without you, my boy,” Joe said with a toothless grin and cackle.

“Oh, Joe,” Sable said putting a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “You’d probably be just fine.” Joe started to shake his head and tried to say something in disagreement. “I’m serious, Joe. You really don’t need me to do anything for you. I’ll probably see you next week.” He patted Joe on the shoulder before walking back towards town.

“Thank you!” Joe shouted after him after he’d grown sick of the silence that had only lasted for a few seconds. Sable waved his hand in the air without turning to look back.

After a few minutes, he reached the front steps of his house. He climbed up onto the patio, making sure to avoid the weak board of wood on the right side of the second step. He slid the latch on the door open with a bit of difficulty, having to put more force into the motion than was reasonably necessary. He’d have to fix that at some point, he thought to himself.

He stepped into the house, the sunlight from the doorway catching the dust floating around in the air, revealing just how awfully dirty the house was.

There was a racket from across the living room. Sable squinted to see what in the dark corner could have caused the noise. He’d hoped it was something different from what it usually was, but he was not extremely surprised to see his housemates Carter and Hannah scrambling for misplaced bedsheets to cover their nudity.

“Oh, don’t worry about covering yourself up. You’re already having sex in the fucking living room,” Sable said as he closed the door. Carter gave him a salute, causing a corner of the blanket he had been holding to his chest to fall, revealing half of Hannah’s reasonably endowed chest. Sable shook his head, completely unimpressed with what Hannah had called her “Money Melons” after having seen them countless times before.

Sable had always wanted to point out that any mention of the word “money” even remotely close to the name of or euphemism for a sensitive and not-to-be-talked-about body part often created shady and unwanted presumptions. Then he was already reminded of a poem he’d stumbled across: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise”.

He continued across the living room to a mostly broken ancient oak door. The lock was the only perfectly functional part of it, not by mistake or random chance. He opened it with a combination only he knew and closed it shut behind him, waiting for a loud click before he felt safe in proceeding down a very narrow staircase. It was a dimly lit staircase, but like the patio steps at the front of the house, Sable had figured out the pattern of motion that spared him the experience of falling down a flight of stairs to what would likely be a very painful and fairly pathetic death.

After safely reaching the bottom of the steps, he pressed his hand on the door leading to his private sanctuary. He always took the time to make the transition into his solitary slice of heaven a special few moments. After a few deep breaths, he pushed his way through to the other side.

He was instantly hit with a familiar, musty aroma. Books. Countless thousands, perhaps even millions, lined the enormous walls of what looked like an ancient temple. He’d found the place after he’d managed to work his way through the oak door when he was three. Upon telling Carter and Hannah of his wondrous find, he seemed to remember getting a less than excited reaction.

“What’s the fun in that?” a slightly chubby Carter had said to him. “You just look at words for hours on end, just to learn a story? That’s what Old Joe’s for! And he usually fires his gun when he’s done too!”

Sable reminded himself of that quotation daily, letting it serve as a reminder that he could have things so much worse than he did. While Carter and Hannah spent their childhoods running about with Robby Tennyson from down the street and “accidentally” stumbling upon the function of their reproductive systems and the pleasure they so often brought, Sable spent every waking hour scouring through the pages of the library’s books.

He’d started with history. Large books, strongly and ornately bound, containing the stories of humanity, fro its beginning to a point in time that was always marked “End Days”. The stories described a constantly changing world full of wonders and love, but also of tragedy and bloodshed. As the stories went on they became more and more violent, stopping abruptly after a passage labled “The Turmoil of Late 2078”. Sable had read the last line of the history books by the time he was five. He looked for what came after the so-called “Turmoil”, but the next book he picked up looked different from the others. It was far smaller on the outside, and the words contained within were arranged strangely.

Hoping to return to the style of book he was used to, he continued down the line only to realize that the next several books were written the same way. After trying twenty or so and not finding any further Histories, he looked carefully at the cover of the smaller books. There was one glaring similarity. A name that had been repeated several times over the course of the Histories: Shakespeare.

He read through the works of the one the Histories had called “the Great Bard” in a week, yet still he thirsted for more. Spending every available hour he could in the library, he read all of the books on the first floor by the time he was eight. Ten years later, he had reached the bottom floor of the enormous structure. It was a good hundred feet from the ceiling and, unlike the other floors, it stretched for at least two hundred feet in every direction.

Sable flicked on the lights he’d installed along the pathway to the edge of the top floor, making the dust-covered walkway barely visible in front of him. He walked down the path, making sure not to run into anything he might have left lying around the last time he’d been there. When he got to the end of it, he pulled a lever on the column to his right. After a few crashes and bangs, a machine attached to the ceiling started pulling a makeshift platform up from the bottom floor. When it reached the top floor, Sable hopped over the railing onto it, sending it slowly back down.

It took a few seconds for the makeshift elevator to reach the bottom floor. Sable was thankful, as always, that it hadn’t collapsed midway down and plunged him to an altogether unpleasant death. He stepped off of the platform and walked to a large chair that was sitting at the end of a row of books. He found the marker on the shelf for which book he was to read next, pulled said marked book from the shelf, and plopped down onto the chair.

It only took him a few moments to get lost in the pages. Suddenly, Sable Shepherd had transported from the humble town of Pleasant to the recesses of his own mind.

The previous collection of paragraphs were my gift to you, kiddos. I wrote this in a quality journal with a quality pen and, if I do say so myself, it turned out to be a pretty quality start to something. There's work to be done, obviously, but there's a lot of potential in this one. Interesting stories to tell, characters to convey, and messages to be subtly wedged in with all the grace of a crowbar. 

I promise I won't make you wait long for chapter two.

IR