Slate, with a mountainous tchock, slattered down the rockface. Slowly shrinking, slowly falling, slowly, cratered at last and crushed into the earth, cracking the ears of all in Arque, the angels above and anyone else observing. Silent, then, full of awe the whole valley until, good God, the excavator had the brains to speak.
He stamped and stomped and smirked up to the cackling edge of the basin, the great plummet, and careened his voice down over the forested valley that lay in indifference to all but the sun, deeming himself its master. Wagons of gold. Is that what he expected? Gouts of oil, arteries of diamond, is that what he expected he unearthed beneath the scab of slate he jettisoned so pointlessly into the valley below, he who wielded dynamite like godhood?
His laugh echoed, off the wounded forest, off the bruised stone canyon, off the sky and off heaven past it, off the measly town of Arque, and rebounded, redoubled in strength and met again, with the force of God or dynamite, the unsteady stone stationed beneath his heel. He fell. He fell after the rock he shucked and boomed just like it, but much more tinily, against the sullen forest floor.
Above is a piece written as part of an exercise called “Being Gorgeous” for the book Steering the Craft. Sorry I’m a day late.