A young contractor, a wise groundskeeper, and the quiet power of doing meaningful work. A story about character, contribution, and finding purpose.
Read here: https://www.mattsheabooks.net/the-groundskeeper/

#ShortStory #Inspiration #Purpose #Mentorship #Character #MeaningfulWork

@stevencudahy
#CreativeWriting #WritingChallenge #MastoPrompt #Challenge #ShortStory #MicroFiction #Fiction
#Prompt: #Broom

BANG!

Smoky, the black cat knocks the besom to the floor. A hazel twig spirls across the floor towards Willow. A slight wry smile flickers across her face as she picks it up.

SPLASH!

Willow adds hemlock to her pot above the fire and she uses the hazel twig to stir the concoction.

Toxic fumes cause kalidoscope colours before her eyes. This is going to be potent!!!

Big Ears

The dog heard it first.

She had come in from her walk with the cold still caught in the long velvet tips of her ears. A bluetick coonhound, broad-chested, heavy-pawed, soft-eyed, and possessed of those famously oversized ears that made her at once noble and faintly comical, she was called many names by her owners, sometimes Pup though she was long past that stage, sometimes Hound, sometimes Girl, and sometimes, when the mood was especially tender, simply Sweetie. She did not trouble herself over names. It was enough that the voices warmed when they used them.

Their walk had been a long one by the standards of the morning, through the damp margins of the little town, along the edge of yards and roadside ditches and bare spring trees where every trunk and post and tuft of grass was rich with messages. Her humans called such walks snifaris, and though she did not know the word as a word, she understood the spirit of it. It was a grand survey of the world. The news of rabbits. The scandal of squirrels. The old musk of raccoon passage in the night. The thin and fading trace of a cat. The cold iron tang of dew on culvert mouths. The living and the dead all left their signatures there, and she read them with grave devotion.

When at last they returned, she drank, circled once in the living room, and then, as was her wont, climbed onto the sofa beside him with the untroubled certainty of a creature much forgiven.

It was a quiet room, made golden now by the morning. The large picture windows on the eastern wall received the rising sun with such openness that it seemed at times less a house than a lantern. Dust motes drifted in the slanted light like ash that had forgotten its fire. The furniture was simple, worn by use rather than age, and warmed by the small evidences of habitation: a folded throw on the chair arm, a mug on the side table, a book left face down, a blanket not quite put away. In the corners sat  plants bright green and blooming. Near the window hung a small tapestry from the recent time when  they had gone away, and she had spent time in the place with others of her kind. She hadn’t minded, but being a shelter dog, there had been a faint fear of they not returning for her.

Now she lay close beside him as he sat with coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, though from time to time he set the phone aside and took up a pen, scribbling in a notebook on his knee. His mornings belonged to prayer, reflection, writing, and the small untidy labor of trying to make sense of being alive. He did not always succeed. Indeed, lately, he felt he succeeded less and less. The world had become loud with strain, though not always in ways that could be named. It groaned beneath its own arrangements. Even here, in this town that still appeared to outsiders as modest and decent and removed from the great engines of calamity, he could feel it at times: a pressure beneath appearances, as if something immense and ill-disposed were passing below the surface of things.

The dog, however, rested.

At intervals she sighed, long and contented, and her breathing deepened beneath his hand as he scratched absently behind her ears. Sometimes he tapped at the phone. Sometimes he paused to sip from the mug, the quiet clink of ceramic seeming part of the room’s own pulse. Once or twice he looked up at the sun moving over the distant low hills. Once he closed his eyes, and the red warmth on his eyelids seemed almost liturgical.

Beside him, the hound dreamed.

Her paws twitched. Her jowls fluttered faintly. Somewhere in whatever shadowed and boundless territory dogs enter in sleep, she was in pursuit of some endlessly receding quarry. It fled, and she followed, as she had followed countless phantom creatures before it through the chambers of instinct and memory.

Then she woke.

Not all at once. Not with a bark or start or violent convulsion. First a change in breath. Then stillness. Then the slow lifting of the head.

He did not notice immediately.

The dog held herself motionless, one forepaw bent slightly inward against the cushion, her ears lifted, though not yet fully pricked. Her eyes were open but not alarmed. She was listening.

To him, the room remained undisturbed. The same light. The same coffee. The same measured peace of another morning in rural Ohio.

Then he felt rather than saw the shift beside him and glanced down.

“What’s up, girl?”

Her gaze did not come to him. It remained fixed toward the windows.

He smiled faintly and scratched her neck, feeling the warm thickness of her fur and the loose skin there. “What is it?”

The dog rose halfway, then settled again without relaxing. A faint line appeared above her eye. Her nostrils worked once, twice. She was not smelling prey. Not exactly. Nor danger in any old familiar sense. Not stranger, not delivery truck, not another dog passing outside. Nothing so ordinary. Her attention had entered a realm beyond his.

He followed her stare to the eastern windows.

Outside, the day was almost offensively beautiful. The yards still held some lingering wetness from recent rain. Beyond them, the town sat in its usual repose, roofs and steeples and utility lines gradually kindling under the sun. The hills in the distance wore that blue-gray softness which made them seem farther away than they were. A few branches stirred. Somewhere, though not in sight, a vehicle passed. Nothing was wrong. The world, in all its surfaces, remained unbroken.

Yet the dog did not lie back down.

Something in her unease reached him, not by logic but by the old subterranean grammar through which one creature may come to know another. He had always loved animals, especially dogs. There had never been a time in his life when the shape of one had not seemed to him a kind of grace. He had trusted them before he trusted many people. They possessed a moral clarity that humans had too often abandoned. Not innocence, exactly—they could be stubborn, sly, destructive, impolite—but a clarity, a wholeness of intention.

His bond with this hound had deepened more quickly than he would have expected. Perhaps because of her gentleness. Perhaps because of the comic solemnity of her face. Perhaps because he had reached an age where every arrival felt touched by mortality, and every new affection carried with it the ache of its future loss.

His eye drifted, almost without purpose, to the old photograph on the shelf.

There he was, a tiny child by a fence, one hand extended toward the family hound. He had been told the story often. How inseparable they were. How the dog would watch over him. How he, still hardly able to form sentences, would babble to it with grave conviction as if the two shared a private language. Looking at the photograph now, he felt the curious folding of years. More than half a century had passed, and still a hound had found him.

He smiled and looked back at the dog on the sofa.

She had not moved.

A low breath came through her nose. Not yet a whine. Not even distress. Only alertness so complete it seemed almost ceremonial.

He set down his mug.

“What do you hear?”

She turned one ear slightly, as though at the shape of his voice, but her gaze remained outward.

He listened now, not because he heard anything but because she did. The house answered him with its usual murmurs: the faint settling creak in the wall, the hush of forced air moving somewhere deep in the vents, the nearly inaudible hum of appliances carrying on their hidden labor. Beneath it all was the larger silence of morning, which is never truly silent but rather made of countless soft obediences—wood, fabric, glass, breath, heat, distant birds, the earth itself turning toward day.

Nothing.

Still, he found he did not wish to resume writing. The page on his knee now seemed curiously beside the point. What he had been trying to articulate a few moments before—something about sorrow, perhaps, or history, or prayer in an age of noise—had drained of urgency. He slipped the pen into the notebook and rested both on the table.

The dog’s body had grown tense beneath its stillness.

Again he looked outside.

The light had strengthened. The sun, now risen above the hills, reached directly through the windows and painted pale bars across the floorboards. The room, rather than becoming cheerful, seemed instead overexposed, as if too much revelation had entered it. Corners that ought to have softened in morning light appeared stark. The objects around him felt at once more present and less secure, their edges sharpened by illumination. It came to him—not as a thought exactly, but as an intuition—that there are mornings when light itself seems merciless.

He shut his eyes for a moment.

Red flared against the lids. He prayed, if what he did in such moments could still be called prayer. Not always petitions. Often only a held silence, or a wordless lifting of grief, or the simple attempt to remain open to what was good in a world increasingly organized against goodness. Lately even prayer felt burdened, as though heaven itself had grown crowded with the unspeakable.

Beside him, the dog gave a sound.

He opened his eyes at once.

Not a bark. Not even a proper whine. Something smaller. A thin involuntary note, almost embarrassed of itself, drawn from deeper than the throat.

He put his hand on her side.

Her muscles were hard.

He asked again.

“What is it, girl?”

Her ears, those great expressive ears, were fixed now with uncanny intensity toward the east. Their cold tips trembled almost imperceptibly.

He listened again.

And this time, perhaps because he had been tutored by her attention, or perhaps because whatever approached had crossed at last into the gross coarser world of human sense, he thought he perceived something.

Not a sound, exactly.

A pressure.

Then something like a murmur at the farthest edge of hearing, so faint he nearly dismissed it as blood in the ears, or memory, or the mind’s bad habit of inventing patterns when given too much quiet in which to work.

He stood up.

The dog stood too, suddenly, all at once, with startling force for so gentle a creature. Her claws pressed into the cushion. Her chest leaned toward the window. A strand of drool caught briefly at her lip and shone in the sun.

He stepped closer to the glass.

The yard lay ordinary and helpless before him. Grass. Driveway. Fence. The road beyond. The neighbor’s tree. No movement. No vehicle. No person. Above, the sky was a cold, widening blue without visible threat.

Still that murmur remained.

It might have been thunder, he thought.

Yet the sky held no weather.

It might have been an aircraft, though not one he could see.

It might have been nothing. It might have been the old machinery of dread, self-winding and unreasonable, fed by too much reading, too much news, too much inwardness, too many mornings spent tracing fracture lines in the age.

He nearly laughed at himself then.

But the laugh did not come.

The dog emitted a longer sound now, a low strained whine that seemed less vocal than visceral. It vibrated through her whole frame. He turned from the window and looked at her fully.

There was no mistaking it now. She was afraid.

Not excited. Not curious. Not guarding. Afraid.

He crossed back to her and laid a steadying hand upon her neck. Her fur there was warm, and beneath it her pulse beat rapidly. She leaned into him without taking her eyes from the window, as if torn between the need to flee and the need to remain near him. He felt, absurdly and tenderly, that he ought to apologize to her for not understanding.

Outside, the morning seemed to hold its breath.

Inside, the room narrowed around the two of them—the dog, rigid and listening; the man, baffled and beginning at last to feel that old ancestral stirring by which the body knows before the mind permits itself knowledge.

The murmur deepened.

Now it was unmistakable. Not loud, but real. A faraway grinding note. A distant mechanical throat clearing itself in the heavens.

He looked east again, squinting into the hardening light.

Nothing.

Nothing but the bright rim of day and the low line of hills and the whole innocent arrangement of things.

The sound grew.

So gradually at first that one might still have denied it, one might still have said no, that is only wind, only imagination, only some truck on the far road, only some crop duster miles off, only some passing thing with no relation to me. But the body is a poor liar when terror nears. He felt it in his chest now, not as pain but as occupation, as if the air before him were being taken over by a force with intentions of its own.

The dog’s whine sharpened.

He moved toward the glass again, and this time laid a hand upon it as if to feel through the pane what the air itself could not yet declare.

The murmur became a growl.

A second later, a whirring undertone joined it, and then a rising pitch, thin and vicious as a blade being drawn very fast across the sky.

He frowned, trying still to make it make sense.

The sun flashed so fiercely on the window that for an instant he saw only reflection: his own shape dimly superimposed upon the yard, the hound behind him on the sofa, the room suspended like a frail lantern against the day.

Then the dog cried out.

It was not a bark. It was a raw, broken sound, almost human in its terror.

He turned—

—and the great shadow passed before the sun.

For one impossible instant the whole room darkened.

Then the missile hit.

That one time I tried out for Jeopardy in Atlantic City and afterwards we ate shrooms and went to the newly opened hyped up Trump Taj Mahal. The view from the turreted deck was marvy but it was all made of beautifully shaped sparkly fiberglass like bumper cars. The magic was hollow. We drummed on them gently for a short while, used the johns, then left feeling sort of cheated.

#Writing #ShortStory #Nonfiction

Challenge #04856-M107: Second Chance for Stuff