deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: We lost her in the well, lowering her down with a flashlight and raisi
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: We lost her in the well, lowering her down with a flashlight and raising an empty bucket. Twenty years later she crawled back out, to ask for my help. She crawls back out of the well a few decades later. Her fingers are waterlogged, translucent around the edges, grip like mold against the stone. She hasn’t grown at all in twenty years, or maybe she’s malnourished. She’s still wearing the clothes that you last saw her in, almost, maybe, as you lowered her down into the well - the raincoat hanging on her in a grimy slick of half-shed skin, the shirt and jeans gone colorless in the dark. She holds up the flashlight, plastic, orange, glass gone grey from gloom and disuse, and shakes it. It sloshes slightly. The muffled rattle of springs. Her voice, when she speaks, is a croak. “Batteries gone dead,” she says. You don’t bother asking how she made the batteries last twenty years to begin with. You ask different inane questions as she stands dripping onto your floorboards, her eyes staring dully at you in a barely-disguised disdain. Like, what it was like down in the well, or if she’s okay, or if it really was all your fault and is she’s going to drag you back down there with her. You feel like you must have some batteries lying around, rolling around in the back of a drawer somewhere, but you rummage through and come up empty. Who even keeps batteries lying around anymore, the chunky silver-and-black cylinder ones for flashlights? You miss the heft of them in your hand, inexplicably. God, it’s been twenty years. You end up offering her an emergency light you bought years ago in case of blackouts. It has rows of LEDs, plugs into an outlet to charge, is shaped more like a lantern than a flashlight. You can stand it upright. A handle unfolds from the top for you to carry it around. She peers at it suspiciously and turns it on and blinds herself. Her wince is the most emotion she’s shown since she crawled out of the well. You can’t convince her to stay. She doesn’t even acknowledge you no matter how many times you tell her that you’re sorry. She just gives you a nod and goes back to the well and starts crawling back down. You watch her disappear. It’s been decades since then, and the moment itself has long since been overwritten by your remembering of it, but you could swear the flashlight gave off orange light back then, like candle flame, the distorted oblong of its beam flickering as it bobbed along the stony curvature of the walls, your voices echoing excitedly up and down the well with every crank you made with the winch, until finally you couldn’t see her flashlight anymore looking down over the well’s edge into the darkness, and when you called to her she didn’t answer back. This time, the light is blindingly white, casts the wet stone in stark relief where she shines it, revealing … the glistening throat of the well, and the hunched-over shape of her, and the long, precarious way down, until the darkness swallows all of it up, just the same. -- source link
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