LJ Idol Season 8 Topic 10: Sticks and Stones (Last minute reversal!)
It was a standard Saturday back when I was in college. It was standard because I was wearing shitty, unwashed jeans, sheathed in sweat and dust, and standing on a creaking scaffold bouncing precariously over three feet of translucent mudwater.
Another glorious day in the pool business.
The fact that it took place during the school year meant I was far less fatigued. During the summer, we worked seven long-ass days a week in the sun; they ran together until you no longer knew (nor really cared) what day of the week it was. But it also meant I was entirely more exhausted, since "college" meant "up all night coding in C++ and studying out of my Discrete Mathematics textbook". (Or to be more honest, "Playing Final Fantasy 9 with a textbook open on my lap").
Around the pool I went, always in circles, prepping the unfinished concrete surface for the next mortar-bed. We had the forms set to put Belgian Block around the edge of the pool, in lieu of standard coping. A more expensive option, but one I liked. The mid-sized granite blocks split the difference between the naturally random contours of field stone, and the regimented order of brick or flagstone.
I had one hand on the violently jagged concrete base that would soon be a love seat, and was scraping my bloody knuckles against the wall, prying at something or other. Above me the tentative line of granite blocks were laid out regimentally along the wooden forms. As I worked, I caught sudden movement out of the corner of my eye: one of the blocks had suddenly pitched forward off of the pegboard form. For a split second it was in midair, to my right, plummeting towards the rough concrete surface.
I will never understand what happened in my idiot, reptile brain. But I reached out and caught it.
My arm extended all the way out, and every ounce of leverage working against me, I didn't even slow the thing down. An instant later, with a crunching whop, each furthest knuckle and fingernail on my right hand was smashed between a hurtling chunk of granite and the corner of a rough, unfinished concrete shelf.
Even before I heard the bang, I saw stars populating the white that appeared around the edge of my vision. It's the only time in my life that I saw stars where I didn't get smacked somewhere above the shoulders. There was no initial yelp, it was replaced by an intake of breath as I stepped backward off the scaffold and into the shallow end. That breath rumbled as I clutched my unresponsive right hand, and rocketed back out like a spit-laced locomotive of profanity.
"HOOWWWAAAAHHH FUCKING DAMMIT, GOD FUCKING SHIT-FUCK, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST AH YOU MOTHER-FUCKING SON OF A GOD DAMN WHORE, fffffFFFFFFUUUUUCK..."
I think we can cut it off there. I remember being mildly worried, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, that I was turning into a wimp. Never before had a simple smack of the hand hurt that badly. And this was a job where we would joke that you should just start the day by standing in a bucket of water and smacking your left thumb-knuckle with a sledgehammer, because both of these things were simply gonna happen.
Then I looked at the swollen purple glove that had replaced my right hand. Maybe my escalated reaction was called for this time.
As luck would have it I didn't break anything, but the ring finger - which had taken the brunt of it - looked like an inflexible thumb for a week.
My Dad, being the compassionate sort of guy he was, threw me some electrical tape (to bind the fingers together) and a flat shovel (to fish the granite block out of the water with). In truth, I recall that he did have a look of concern on his face over this one, although that may have been due to the high-pressure volley of blasphemy that echoed around the hollow concrete shell (and presumably into our customer's ears). We only worked five or six more hours after that, too.
In summary, a stone fell off a wooden piece of form, followed by a torrent of offensive names. I think that hit all our bases for this prompt. Moral is, don't try to catch what you can't control in your hands.
Another glorious day in the pool business.
The fact that it took place during the school year meant I was far less fatigued. During the summer, we worked seven long-ass days a week in the sun; they ran together until you no longer knew (nor really cared) what day of the week it was. But it also meant I was entirely more exhausted, since "college" meant "up all night coding in C++ and studying out of my Discrete Mathematics textbook". (Or to be more honest, "Playing Final Fantasy 9 with a textbook open on my lap").
Around the pool I went, always in circles, prepping the unfinished concrete surface for the next mortar-bed. We had the forms set to put Belgian Block around the edge of the pool, in lieu of standard coping. A more expensive option, but one I liked. The mid-sized granite blocks split the difference between the naturally random contours of field stone, and the regimented order of brick or flagstone.
I had one hand on the violently jagged concrete base that would soon be a love seat, and was scraping my bloody knuckles against the wall, prying at something or other. Above me the tentative line of granite blocks were laid out regimentally along the wooden forms. As I worked, I caught sudden movement out of the corner of my eye: one of the blocks had suddenly pitched forward off of the pegboard form. For a split second it was in midair, to my right, plummeting towards the rough concrete surface.
I will never understand what happened in my idiot, reptile brain. But I reached out and caught it.
My arm extended all the way out, and every ounce of leverage working against me, I didn't even slow the thing down. An instant later, with a crunching whop, each furthest knuckle and fingernail on my right hand was smashed between a hurtling chunk of granite and the corner of a rough, unfinished concrete shelf.
Even before I heard the bang, I saw stars populating the white that appeared around the edge of my vision. It's the only time in my life that I saw stars where I didn't get smacked somewhere above the shoulders. There was no initial yelp, it was replaced by an intake of breath as I stepped backward off the scaffold and into the shallow end. That breath rumbled as I clutched my unresponsive right hand, and rocketed back out like a spit-laced locomotive of profanity.
"HOOWWWAAAAHHH FUCKING DAMMIT, GOD FUCKING SHIT-FUCK, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST AH YOU MOTHER-FUCKING SON OF A GOD DAMN WHORE, fffffFFFFFFUUUUUCK..."
I think we can cut it off there. I remember being mildly worried, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, that I was turning into a wimp. Never before had a simple smack of the hand hurt that badly. And this was a job where we would joke that you should just start the day by standing in a bucket of water and smacking your left thumb-knuckle with a sledgehammer, because both of these things were simply gonna happen.
Then I looked at the swollen purple glove that had replaced my right hand. Maybe my escalated reaction was called for this time.
As luck would have it I didn't break anything, but the ring finger - which had taken the brunt of it - looked like an inflexible thumb for a week.
My Dad, being the compassionate sort of guy he was, threw me some electrical tape (to bind the fingers together) and a flat shovel (to fish the granite block out of the water with). In truth, I recall that he did have a look of concern on his face over this one, although that may have been due to the high-pressure volley of blasphemy that echoed around the hollow concrete shell (and presumably into our customer's ears). We only worked five or six more hours after that, too.
In summary, a stone fell off a wooden piece of form, followed by a torrent of offensive names. I think that hit all our bases for this prompt. Moral is, don't try to catch what you can't control in your hands.