Freehand

To download an MP3 of Christina Mason reading this story, please follow this Mediafire link.

As I woke, I immediately felt the intense heat of the sun on my already sweating forehead. The first motion I made, before opening my eyes or taking a deep breath, was wiping the back of my hand across my brow and attempting to mop up some of the perspiration dripping down my face. It did little to help, but I didn’t think there was much that would help in this heat.

I sat up slowly; keeping my eyes closed in early defense against what I was sure was a blinding sun. I lifted my right hand to shield my eyes and braced myself as I peered through my digits cautiously. When I wasn’t blinded immediately I decided to keep my pace slow. I cleared my throat and readied myself to stand up.

“Hey there, he’s awake!” I heard a thick drawl call out, breaking me from my reverie. The man’s voice was velveteen like, thick and slightly uncomfortable to listen to. His voice was considerably deeper than mine and you could hear a lifetimes worth of tobacco on it. Ironically, the man was quite young, late twenties I figured, and he had those sorts of classic looks that girls always seemed to be drawn to. I immediately didn’t want to like this man. So, of course, he had to be the first to come over and greet me. He walked over and hoisted me up, lifting me as if I was his traveling bag. So much for going slow. “Howdy there,” he said as friendly as the cliché would allow him to. “Name’s Tom. You feelin’ alright friend?” he asked, genuine concern on the man’s face.

Tom was one of those fellows who took the “country music” lifestyle far too seriously for his own good. His clothes looked like something out of a John Wayne movie, except his hat was gray rather than black or white. His face was grizzly with an iron like jaw, his eyes cerulean blue. He was about 5’10” but walked like a man with considerable height to him. The only thing that betrayed Tom’s “tough guy” exterior was his kind smile and the laugh lines around his eyes.

“Yeah, just a little dizzy I think,” I answered, touching my temple lightly as if to illustrate my point. It was really to mop up more sweat.

“Good, good; we was startin’ to worry about ya,” he smiled, clapping his hand against the meat of my shoulder. “Not that it makes much sense to worry bout ya in this particular arrangement,” he laughed at himself. I didn’t get the joke. Tom seemed to pick up on this one. “You’ve been out for a little while now,” he explained.

“Yeah…I don’t even know how I got here…” I trailed off, looking around. Nothing about this place seemed familiar at all. This wasn’t home. This wasn’t where I was stationed. Could I have been hit so hard I ended up this far away from home? “You um…you in charge here?” I asked Tom. He laughed at me.

“I don’t reckon anyone’s in charge round here friend. Least not anyone we can see,” he amended quickly, looking over to the men back towards the hole.

“Well, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Friend, you just aren’t asking any questions I can give ya a decent answer to. I ain’t sure what it is we’re doing here…” he answered. I was physically incapable of stopping my eyes from rolling as Tom continued to avoid my questions.

“What do you gents do here?” I asked sternly, looking at the countless number of men all digging a very deep, wide hole. The hole seemed about nine feet wide, though that was a rough estimate. As for the depth, I couldn’t accurately even guess considering that there were men of many different sizes in the hole. It was most likely about four or five feet deep. Tom leaned on his shovel.

“Well,” he started. “We wake up and we dig then we go to sleep. Sometimes we’ll take breaks and talk or what have you but mostly we just wake up and dig and then go to sleep. Course, sleep doesn’t really do much for us, but we do it anyway. I reckon it’s somethin of a habit.”

“Why are you digging?” I asked, looking at the hole. “What are you digging?”

“Can’t answer that one either,” Tom shrugged, looking over the hole. “It don’t seem to get bigger or deeper or change in any way really. We just seem to dig it and it just seems to stay put.” Tom looked at me and I must have given him a questioning look because he simply shrugged his massive shoulders again.

“That doesn’t make any sense though,” I stated in a kind of outrage that lacked anger. That hole simply had to get bigger.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Tom laughed good-naturedly. “Come on friend, we’ll take a walk. You’ll feel better after you get your blood flowin where it needs to be again.”

Tom put an arm across my shoulders and half-led-half-pulled me along side him. The terrain was dirt: that was really all that was there. It was dirt, some patches of dried plants and a few little ledges of chalky-rock but mostly it was dirt. It was dirt and heat and sky. This place was purely nothing. Looking out onto the horizon, there continued to be nothing. Just blue sky and flat, protruding rocks sticking out into the atmosphere. It would have been serene had it not been so infuriating.

It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t thirsty either. I was hot, but that was it. I wasn’t fatigued or exhausted or anything but hot. That didn’t make sense either. If it was this hot than I should have found myself thirsty. It would have been hard for me to walk. Nothing about this place made sense. There was a giant hole that never got any bigger no matter how much anyone dug. There was a man who had no answers and yet seemed to know the most here. There was no hunger, no thirst, just epic heat. This place was eternal, the atmosphere was indifferent and, quite simply, nothing seemed to be anything. How or why this realization led me to understand I’m not sure, but the proverbial light bulb flashed over my head and instantly, the illogical world I was now living in made perfect sense.

“I’m dead aren’t I?” I asked, the epiphany washing over me like cold water, only considerably less refreshing. Tom smiled.

“Course ya are friend.”

“Are you dead?”

“Well one ought to reckon,” Tom chuckled, looking back to his comrades with the shovels. “We all are.”

“Where…” I started, clearing my throat lightly as I tried to gather up the courage to ask the question. “Where are we?” I asked.

“Now see friend, that is a good question,” Tom sat down on a slab of chalky rock. He licked him lips in thought, his handsome face twisting slightly. “We all got our guesses, we all got our feelin’s, but there’s only one thing that we can say with certainty,” Tom nodded, lifting his hat slightly. He squinted against the sun and locked eyes with me. “This sure ain’t where we were hopin’ to end up.”

“You think this is Hell?” I asked, sitting down next to Tom so he wouldn’t have to strain his eyes. He shrugged dismissively.

“I don’t think so. Jake over there does. And Max over at the far end thinks this is a kinda, atonement area: where you can make up for your sins and alike…” Tom trailed off.

“What do you think then?”

“Well,” Tom coughed rather suddenly, moving his entire body in the opposite direction from where I was sitting. His large frame quaked as he shook from the spasms. As quickly as his spell had come over him it was gone and he was looking back to me. “Pardon. Anyways, I’m not even sure how to reckon a guess on where this is. I think Max is probably on to something because people are always comin’ and a-goin’ here. There was a fella named Jack who just up and disappeared a few days ago and there’s been a load of em before Jack. There will be a load of em after Jack too I reckon. So I guess callin’ this place, oh what’s the word, Purgatory ain’t that bad of an idea…”

The silence that we sat in wasn’t comfortable, nor was it made any more awkward due to the other’s company. The silence was difficult purely for the information we were both thinking over. There was nothing that could be said to calm neither the situation nor our nerves about the uncertainty of it all. This was simply one of those times that the awkward silence was something to be dealt with.

“How long have you been here Tom?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know bout that,” he answered, furrowing his brow slightly as he looked off to the sun disappearing over the horizon. “See, the sun ain’t real; it don’t come up. We’ve taken shifts and it goes from dusk to dawn. We’ve tried just takin’ off a few hours and seein’ if that lines it up and it don’t: it’s like we ain’t supposed to know what time it is…” Tom trailed off, his face twisting into sorrow for the first time in the conversation. “I wish I could tell ya.”

“When did you die?”

“1848 if I remember. I was minin’ out in California and…” Tom struggled with the memory. “In all honesty I don’t remember much from then no more. Was that long ago?” Tom turned to me, his face filled with hope. I wasn’t sure what answer he was hoping for: neither seemed like they would make this better.

“It was almost a century ago Tom,” I answered. Tom nodded, looking back out to the horizon.

“And how did you die friend?” he asked me, his eyes still fixed on the orange orb in front of us.

“I was fighting in a war. A World War. We have these things called air planes, which are things that fly through the sky that carry people…” I started.

“Yeah, Jake talks about ‘em. He was what they called a pilot.” Tom smiled, seeming proud of his knowledge. I smiled too.

“Yeah, so was I. I was shooting at our enemy and, well, it would appear someone was faster than I was,” I sighed, looking down to my hands. The sky seemed to be taunting me, mocking me for falling from it. The blue angered me in a way I wasn’t used to.

“Hey, we’ve all been beat here,” Tom smiled, hitting me on the back again. “Come on now, stand up. S’bout time for us to start headin’ into the tents and gettin’ some sleep.”

“Tents? What tents?” I asked. Tom pointed off behind him casually. I looked over and, sure enough, there were tents set up for each of the many diggers working on the hole. They had not been there before.

“I know, don’t worry. You’ll get used to it, just like you’ll get used to putting your head down and immediately wakin’ up,” Tom smiled. He swung his arm around my shoulders and started moving, leading me back towards the hole as we walked in silence again.

“Tom?” I started, looking to the taller man. “Do you think I’m going to be here for a long time?” The sound of fear and desperation in my voice was something that I was completely unfamiliar with. In all my life, when confronted with terrifying situations I had always managed to keep my cool. I suppose this was hardly a situation that I had ever been in before.

“That I can’t answer friend,” he sighed, his lips pressed into a tight grimace. “I reckon you’ll be here as long as you need be.”

—

© Some rights reserved. “As I Woke” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.

Christina Mason is an English major with aspirations of becoming an author, particularly in the sci-fi and horror genres. She can be contacted at christinapmason@gmail.com. [Website.]