Wet Season In A Dry Town
We all dug through the baker’s basement, and then dug some more. The handyman drove his backhoe in by smashing through the cement foundation and devised a pulley system to get the used appliances, mattresses, life-detritus, and ever-growing mounds of dirt and cement and rocks out of the basement. After some time the area took on the shape of an inverted step pyramid, with segmented levels funneling down. One of our children got sick twelve feet below the foundation, complaining that he felt nauseous. We slowly lifted him out of the basement via the pulley system and continued our exploration. The strange old man who had taken up residence at the baker’s some days before we'd started our work told us what we needed to do as he sat by, commenting on the weather that never changed from overcast gray murk, with a corncob pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“The flood comes early” he said once in a while, “best dig a drain to flush all that water away, eh?”
More people got sick. The banker complained of extreme nausea; he vomited, stood back up, and said that we needed to stop and fill the hole before we dug into a nightmare. The old man at the top of the hole, looking down at us with smoke wisping past his face, said to get rid of him. We buried him screaming in one of the walls of dirt until we couldn't hear anything, and returned to our work.
We dug up bathtubs and things of that sort: porcelain and plastic capped with metal faucets, and flat items we could stand on. The doctor, who had only recently returned to us, stopped in at one point and looked down at us and smiled. He said he felt pride in our work. Then he tripped and became a sprawling dead heap in the middle of the dig site. A few of us rubbed our stomachs with hunger at his corpse. The pastor commented that once one's spirit left their body, the remains ceased to be human, theologically-speaking. The old man whipped out a fork and knife from pockets and yelled down, “Fry the fucker!”
We dug. We excavated massive buried statues of the ouroboros, thanks to the handyman’s backhoe, and we dug more. Each step became steeper, and yet the area of our negative pyramid's bottom never shrank. Sometimes one or two people complained of nausea and evil and we buried them in the wall too. When the schoolteacher's nausea caused her to fall we did the same thing we did to the doctor, all the while the old man at the top of the pyramid cried out orders. We didn’t need sleep yet.
“Flood season comes quickly,” the old man said, and we nodded and went about our work, ignoring the dry summer subsisting innumerable stories over our head.
He finally ordered us to stop, and the old man climbed to the bottom. He tucked his pipe in stained overalls and looked down at the dirt and spat on it and scratched with a boot until red came to the surface—a drop-in-style bathtub—and the old man giggled. He scratched at its perimeter and revealed its edges with his bootheels. With our strongest men now excavating it, we barely got it to one side of the final inverted step, and its absence sat darkness, from where a deep gurgling came. The old man danced with the sound like a happy prospector, slapping his thighs, his pipe back in his mouth and puffing smoke. He told us, pointing at that abyss, that we needed to dig just a little further. We listened, and crawled in; and as the rain started to fall from a sky we couldn't see, we began our occultation.