#1 You Were Tired

I didn’t say you did it on purpose, but I blame you. Yet each time I reluctantly came back to life, reincarnated as a creature of vengeance with a darker heart beating in the echo of your betrayal.

I woke to the sound of the raindrops slapping my window like an insistent invitation to a joyless party.  The ground would be saturated with rain, and water would’ve seeped through the foundation cracks into the acid neutralization room by now. I was the project manager for the renovations and responsible for keeping it ready until the project start.  It would be the fourth time the room was flooded this month.

 

I called you to accompany me to survey the damage- you maintained the pumps, hoses and tank associated with the room’s operation. When I arrived, you opened the unmarked door next to the Plumbers Shop and invited me to walk down the unlit stairwell on rusty metal treads that clanged with every step.  As we reached the room affectionately named the “snake pit” we both gasped at the sight of ooze running over the top of the ten-foot deep tank and plywood planks that were set down for walking over now floating around the room.  The mosquitos would come soon if the water was not pumped out.

 

As we stood at the edge of the tank, you complained bitterly about every misfortune associated with this room. The last catastrophe haunted you; the19-foot hose that broke loose from clamps on the ceiling came apart at the connectors and spewed s**t all over the room, and you were tasked with lowering a one-hundred pound pump into the sewage ejector pit while standing in human excrement with waders. You blamed the contractor who installed it three years ago, and you faulted the other one who couldn’t start the replacement job sooner.  I didn’t say this is your job because I knew it made you feel better to complain, but the reality is when the equipment under your watch fails, you own it.

 

You’ve probably forgotten our happier days by now. When I met you, I thought you were the only friendly person on campus who could speak in complete sentences.  We’d laugh about building the porch over the college president’s yard to cover up the holes her dog dug into the lawn. Now I’m the bearer of bad news. I told you to pump out the water for the fourth time and you are tired…of the rain, the pit, the broken equipment, the construction and especially me.

 

When we had no words left, we pondered the cataclysmic mess in silence.  The murky void held us in a hypnotic trance, daring us to look deeper into our fears and dreams. Floating about the oily scum, faint suggestions to an existence without complaining professors, obstructive coworkers, and never-ending projects invited me to simply let go.  You were also captivated by a glimmer within the detritus that offered you a way out of your misery. 

 

So you turned and pushed me in.  For a moment I thought you might reach down to pull me out and tell me it was an accident.  But the steel lid that was set to the side, that you always said was too heavy to move, you dragged it with superhuman strength until it fit tightly over the tank to keep me submerged inside.

 

I didn’t try to fight my way out because I was tired too.  I was weary of this job that stalled after the sixth redesign and the contractor who wouldn’t start the work he was hired to do. His latest excuse was that the sewage posed a health hazard because it was laced with sexually transmitted diseases from a professor’s lab research.  When I could no longer hold my breath, I swallowed the stagnant effluent and drowned in the chemical stew.  The solvents and acids that drained from the building’s chemistry labs collected in this steel drum and ate my flesh and bone.  My bloated face and milky eyes stared into eternity with the look of shock, not from your betrayal but from the surprise of how my life ended. I never made it to a retirement home in Florida with sunset views over the clear water, instead I took my last breath of life in a thankless cesspool of collective s**t that spewed every single day.

Reviews

[Ms claws]

Wow! What a shocking and unique work! So you are Firehorse. You have a really big, important job!
I know it seems people use you nonchalantly to get the job done.
But it's kind of like the Pandemic. We don't know what to do until we are there.
Your resposibilities will lessen or grow more as you are improved upon.
Then, someday you will be obsolete. Thanks for all you have done and continue to do now.
(Great writing!)

[Firehorse]

Thanks Eternity for the first review of my first post! It has been a huge catharsis to write this and the series to come. You guessed it I had to quit I couldn't take it anymore ;)

[Mark Raines]

Great words and very unique

[JayG]

• "I didn’t say this is your job because I knew it made you feel better to complain."

Here is where publishers and readers will turn away.

Why? From the reader's viewpoint, who’s saying this? And to whom? No way to know. So, since confusion can’t be retroactively removed, here is where the reader turns away.

You’re making the most common error in fiction writing: You’re handing the reader a transcription of you telling the story as-if-to-an-audience. That cannot be made to work because no one but you knows the emotion to place in the reading. No one but you knows the visual elements of your performance. So, you’ve given the reader a storyteller’s script. And for that to work the reader would have to perform it exactly as you would—which isn’t possible.

You’ve missed a critical point: Writers have been screwing up by falling into invisible-to-the-writer traps for centuries. And for just as long, they’ve been finding ways to avoid that. Dig into those skills and you avoid them, too, and, learn how to hook the reader. Skip that step and you have this story.

Not good news, I know. But you have LOTS of company—over 90% of hopeful writers. So it’s no big deal. Still, to write fiction you need to acquire the skills of the profession, because nothing else works, including our school-day report writing skills. So...grab a good book on adding wings to your words, like Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict, Jack Bickham’s, Scene and Structure, or, Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, and dig in.

You’ll be amazed at how much of it is obvious once pointed out.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain