Archive for the 'Short Stories' Category
Tuesday update…A short story “The path”
Was watching a show the other day that reminded me how much i enjoy short stories. Quick bursts of images and emotions, a snack for the imagination when you aren’t hungry enough for a novel.
It’s been a while since I’ve written one, thought id give it another shot. This is just a random picture that poppped into my head today, and it felt like it could be fun to flesh out a little.
A man was walking down a path. He never stopped to eat or rest, never looked to the left or the right, he just walked, day after day. Though he really couldn’t tell if it was day after day or even night after night since the world around him looked exactly the same from one moment to the next. It was dark. darkness everywhere. The kind of darkness that swims before the open eye creating shapes that are at the same time both mysterious and impossible to decipher.
It never bothered the man that it was dark, and the fact that he couldn’t see had no impact on his decision to keep walking, it never entered his mind to stop, or to ponder a direction or change of course. He went where his feet took him. There were times he would walk with his eyes closed. The world looked exactly the same. There were even days when he wasn’t sure whether his eyes were open or shut.
The only thing he was sure of was the ground beneath his feet. His steps struck the world below with the crisp, echo of a polished pair of boots strutting alone through an empty marble hall. Each stride evoked a pleasant clopping sound, that rose up to his ears before fading into the blackness around him. So even and precise were his footsteps, that if he had been a clock, he would have kept perfect time.
Clap, clop, clap clop, every second of every day the man walked, until one day he slipped.
He didn’t know what it was that had interrupted the even flow of his movements, he couldn’t see. All he knew was that his foot went out from under him. He was so alarmed by this that his eyes bulged twice as large as normal, allowing him to take in twice as much of nothing as he felt his body tip, teeter, and then fall. But instead of his body striking the path, the man felt his legs fall into nothing, then his knees, then his torso. His eyes couldn’t bulge any larger but if they could have they would have. Instinct spurred his arms to flail and miracle of miracles, his fingers found purchase. His hands clenched, his knuckles whitened, and his body stopped falling. Pressed between his finger tips was a slab of cool stone no more than two inches thick.
Like a pendulum losing speed, his body dangled into nothing, swaying back and forth beneath the slab. It was still dark and he still couldn’t see, but the man realized that the slab he was hanging from must be the path he had been walking before his foot slipped.
“Curious.” he thought.
“There seems to be nothing on this side of the path.”
As he dangled and mused, he wondered if there was anything on the other side of the path, or if the path itself was nothing but a thin strip of rock suspended in darkness.
“If it is true, then i must count myself fortunate to not have fallen before. What are the odds that i would walk for so long, oblivious to the closeness of such a plummet, weaving this way and that in perfect harmony with the stone beneath my feet. Who knows how long i would have been able to do it, had my foot not slipped.”
“What did i slip on?” he thought, “And did i slip on the only obstacle in my path, or did my luck simply run out? Perhaps my path is full of treacherous terrain, and i, being oblivious, dodged them all in my ignorance until now?”
Hanging on by his fingertips, swaying over nothing, the man suddenly found he had more to think about than any other moment in his life. He also found his arms were beginning to tire.
“I wonder what’s below me? Perhaps there is another path.” but the man’s instinct told him there was nothing below him. Even as he craned his neck to catch a glimpse of what he guessed was down, there was something more ominous and all consuming about the blackness he saw there as opposed to the blackness he saw when looking up.
His arms continued to weary, “I should probably pull myself up.” he thought.
Straining, pulling, groaning, writhing, the man slowly managed to pull his body up. The cheek of his face collapsed on the stone path as he flopped on his belly like a snake. His legs dangled over the edge, but his torso held him fast. Overcome by curiosity, the man stretcehd his arms forward, his fingers sliding across the suspended slab of stone, inch by inch they went, feeling, probing into the darkness. Suddenly they dropped off.
“Nothing on that side either.” he thought. After recovering his breath, the man pulled his arms and legs in and there he sat, at what he guessed was the middle of his path. Cross legged, he rested his chin in the crook of his clasped hands. and squinted into the darkness.
“Nothing.”
Before he slipped, the thought of falling, never would have been considered, but as he sat on that narrow strip of stone, falling was all he could think about.
He sat for days. Sometimes he stood, but he never moved. Not one step forward. Not one step backward.
“How can i continue to walk? How will i know where to place my feet? How will i keep myself from falling?”
They were paralyzing questions. Doubt consumed him. Eventually the man became frustrated, he was tired of sitting. Getting back onto his stomach, determined to move forward, the man crawled, feeling the path with his entire body. He had crawled no more than half a body length, when his hand struck an object.
His fingers wrapped around it. It was smooth and cylindrical. Cold to the touch with a circular metal knob sticking out from what he guessed was the bottom.
“Curious.” he thought, “i wonder if this is what made me slip?”
The thought made him furious. To think that whatever it was had shattered his illusions of serenity. Before slipping everything had been fine, he had cared about nothing but his next step, never worrying about falling, never worrying about going in the right or wrong direction, but once he slipped, there was no turning back. No way to go back to blissful ignorance. In his mind, whatever he held in his hand had nearly ruined his life.
The man was about to hurl the object into the endless darkness when another thought struck him.
“I wonder what it is?”
The man’s curiosity suddenly overwhelmed his anger and he began feeling it all over, turning it end over end, rubbing it against his face. His fingers found the metal knob, and in a moment he felt compelled to turn it. The metal creaked in the darkness and then light sprang to life. A blinding burst of illumination, it was the first light the man had ever seen and his eyes burned and watered as he squinted and blinked, desperate to see. Minutes passed and finally the man beheld what was in his hands.
It was a lantern.
That’s it for now. I had a longer conclusion planned but time is running short. I also thought about doing several variations on the idea. One had the man hurling the object in anger only to have it land on another path for a different man to find adding a stronger sense of irony to the story. Another more folktale style would be to have a number of people in quicker succession trip over the lantern only to kick it aside until finally one person picks it up.
Anyway i enjoyed toying with the idea, hope you enjoyed reading it. Let me know what you think and maybe ill tweak it/rewrite it later, and no in my haste to write this i did not proof to heavily for grammar/spelling, i do apologize if there are errors.
Thomas McClurg
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