A Fortnightcap by DL Thurston
I was reminded recently of the geology class I took as a kid. It wasn’t anything more than a program to give bored kids something to do during the summer, and I can’t remember how old I was except that it was at a time when the word “schist” was extremely funny. We got to collect rocks, we were given others, and the activities included things like gluing rocks to bits of index card and labeling them with their type.
The highlight was going to involve a wet saw and a bucket of rocks each a little larger than a shooter marble. It was geode cutting day. Each kid got to pull rocks at random out of the pail and the teacher would saw them in half until there was a geode. It was exciting. Normal rock shops, even the ones that have cut your own geodes, tend to just give you one chance to get lucky.
I can remember the whine of the saw. It was damn loud. Then again, most childhood sense memories get amplified don’t they? It would roar to life, then whine through each of the rocks in turn before spinning down just to start the whole cycle again with the next rock. Each time it was the same. Except for the one time it wasn’t.
I can remember that sound, too. It was like the scream of the saw going through the rock, but there was something else. Something more. I don’t think the teacher heard it when it happened, he had ear protection on, but we did. The teacher picked up one of the halves of the rock, and we could see it was hollow inside. But it wasn’t a geode, they tended to have intricate crystals pointing inwards from all directions.
And it wasn’t empty.
The thing in the rock was green. I don’t know if that was its true color, or if that was the result of the blade slicing through it. I just remember an intense green, and some sort of fluid dripping from the cavity. We’d learned the smell during the class. It was sulfur. A few of the kids screamed, others rushed forward the way kids will do when they see something gross. I wasn’t part of that crowd. I hung back, not getting a good view until the tight ring of kids pushing in to see scrambled backwards.
The thing was moving. It was alive, for however much longer. It wasn’t more than a half an inch long, and pulled itself forward with two limbs just above where the saw had cut it through. It had eyes. I can’t remember much more of the details, but I remember the eyes. It looked at each of us, and as the eyes fell on me I heard a voice, soft and dying, in my head. The word is one I don’t know, I never knew. Then it collapsed, and died.
It’s odd that I have difficulty now remembering this. It’s all so clear, but even as early as my mom picking me up I just showed her the geode I had, and happily went home. I remember mostly in dreams, or in that odd floating period just before falling asleep. I remember its eyes. And I remember the word it spoke. I know it’s important somehow. I just wish I could hold onto the memory. Hold onto the word.
If only I knew why it was so important.
Fortnightcaps are biweekly experimentation into short form fiction. All Fortnightcaps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. So if you like the story, please feel free to link people back here. And if you didn’t, maybe the one in two weeks will be better.