Thursday May 15th, 2014

The exercise:

Write about: the cut.

Kat and I spent some more time working on the strawberry plants this morning. Felt like some actual progress was made, which was nice. Our friend from the bakery is coming again on Sunday morning, so that should take another chunk out of the workload.

And we found out today that our first WWOOFer will be arriving on May 25th. She's coming to us from Calgary and I can't wait to have a (more or less) full time helper out there.

Then on June 4th we'll have, for the first time since we started doing this, two full time helpers, as our second WWOOFer will be joining us from Denmark.

So the goal right now is to simply survive until then.

Mine:

You had a really good training camp.

He unzips his bag slowly with hands heavy with scars and fatigue. Tired from reaching for dreams that remain beyond his grasp. Exhausted, to be honest.

There was some fierce competition for our open roster spots.

Pieces of battered equipment are dumped into the bag in ones and twos. He doesn't bother packing them properly, though a voice in the back of his head tells him his mother would not approve. He simply continues to shove more gear inside.

It broke our hearts to have to cut you from the team.

Not as much as it broke his.

We hope that it's some consolation for you to know that you were the final player that we cut this year.

No, it isn't.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Calgary and Denmark! I like that your help is only coming from the cold parts of the world :) And I'll be intrigued to see what additional stuff you find yourself doing when you've got the help to sustain it!
Wow, that's a lovely, emotional piece. The two voices speaking work really well here, and his actions telegraph what's happened without spoiling the reveal. Nicely done :)

The cut
The Terraform-9T was a spherical object in orbit around the planet formerly known as Gliese-GT791. It had been launched from Earth 80 years ago, and accelerated up to a respectable fraction of the speed of light, arriving at the planet fifteen years before the Generation ships, carrying colonies of humans, were due. When the Terraform-9T achieved stable orbit it woke up its operators, deployed an arsenal of tools that all made very effective weapons, and waited for instructions.
As LaBentia depressed the Enter key programme 10998 was loaded into memory and the twin gravitational masers adjusted their position, the whole of the Terraform-9T revolving about an axis to bring them to bear on the surface of the planet. There was a hum as the masers powered up, and then invisible beams of focused gravitational waves, so broad and thick they were better described as towers than beams, struck the planet and dragged a country-sized piece of coastline upwards. Molten rock boiled out from underneath it, spilling outwards until the cyan lasers engaged and described sharp, deep cuts in the newly forming rock. Water from the sea rushed in, vapourising initially into huge white clouds that slowly drifted southwards on the prevailing winds, and then filling in the cuts and channels.
"LaBentia?" Dedwayne (he claimed his mother had stuttered when naming him) was stood behind her, his shovel-like hands gripping her head-rest tightly. "That coastline was marked as finished three weeks ago."
"Oh crap," said LaBentia. While inelegant, it was eloquent for her; she preferred the effort of designing new continents and landscapes to speaking to humans.
"Yeah," said Dedwayne, his hands flexing and releasing, the head-rest squeaking with stress. "Yeah, you're writing your name in the coastline again, aren't you?"

Marc said...

Greg - yeah, I think they're both looking forward to the warmth :D

Haha, wonderful buildup to that perfectly timed ending. Some great details in this one; it seems like a setting just begging to be explored some more.