Here is my response to Day 29 of Sammi Cox’s writing challenge. It’s a test-run for a scene in which I take characters from my upcoming Novella and place them in a prequel.
This scene takes place in the American Dirty Bottoms, Southern Illinois, during the late 1800’s. Mounds are being dug up and artifacts are being hidden. Little do they know, something ancient sleeps under the Native mounds.
What the Roost Remembers
The roots of my cottonwood run fifty feet down into the gumbo, wrapping around things that fell from the sky long before the two-leggers piled the first basket of dirt.
I feel it through my talons when the river drops: a low, singing pulse in the deep slate, vibrating at the frequency of crushed bone. The old people knew enough to pile sixty feet of black clay over the pulse, packing it tight, singing their wards, and leaving the ground dark.
Drexl came with his steam shovels and brass transits to rip the skin off.
From the high limb, I watched them haul Silas Mercer out of Drexl’s dig site. Drexl’s men move like scared possums—sweating through their canvas shirts, their heartbeats stuttering against their ribs like trapped moths. They shoved Mercer into my hollow trunk, panting against the rot.
The men thought the mud would hide him. They thought the lead type stuffed in his coat would drag him straight to hell. But Mercer’s skin had no heat in it. Not the ordinary cold of a dead buck in the brush—this was a sterile, radiant chill. Wherever his knuckles brushed the bark, the lichen turned black and shriveled to ash.
He had touched what Drexl opened.
When the shovel-men scurried back toward the rail spur, splashing through the ditch with their iron picks banging against their hips, the slough fell silent. The frogs didn’t call. A barred owl two ridges over choked off its cry mid-breath.
The cane-brake parted. No splash. No rustle.
Beulah stepped into the gray light of the marsh.
She wore no petticoats to drag in the gumbo. Just the long, coarse wool cloak, pinned at the throat with a disk of hammered native copper older than the forest. She stood ten feet below my bough, looking not at the murder, but into the hollow.
Her eyes caught the moon—pale, unblinking, reflecting light the way a wolf’s retina burns green in the tall grass.
She stepped to the trunk. She did not recoil from the alkaline stench of Drexl’s lye wash. She reached out one long, sinewy hand and laid two fingers against the surveyor’s spike driven through Mercer’s chest.
She wasn’t mourning. She was checking the seal.
The spike was cold, but around the iron head, the wool was scorched in a tight, geometric circle—the identical blue-gray scorch that marks the stones at the heart of the mounds when the spring waters rise.
“You broke the crust, Silas,” she whispered. Her voice was the sound of heavy river ice grinding against limestone pilings. “Drexl thinks he’s digging up grandfather bones for a glass cabinet in Chicago. He doesn’t know what’s sleeping beneath the salt.”
She reached into Mercer’s weighted coat. Her fingers closed over a fistful of Drexl’s printer’s type—the cold lead cataloging the unauthorized trenches—and let the letters slip through her fingers into the black water. Clink. Clink. Clink.
She looked up into the canopy, straight into my pupils. She knew I was there. Her bloodline had shared this timber with my ancestors since the stars fell into the swamp.
“Watch him,” she told the dark. “When Drexl comes back with the wagon to fetch what Silas took, let the river take the wagon. If the city finds what’s in the clay, they won’t just burn the Bottoms. They’ll burn the sky.”
This concludes the potential opening scene for a prequel to my upcoming Novella, “The American Bottom.” I have yet to decide whether I am going to self publish it or have it published.
What do you think, do you like this tone and atmosphere? Would you want to read more?
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