Fragmented Fiction

Landslide

Story Of My HeArt Pure Fiction Challenge

This is my response to the HeArt Pure Fiction Challenge by JA Vassili and KL Simmons.

The submission below is a thread I’ve been mulling around in my mind for years. I’m a civil engineer. It’s a steady and unglamorous occupation, with our best works consistently falling under the radar: bridges and buildings that stay standing under the most demanding of conditions, water that magically and consistently flows from your tap and down your drain, roads that get you from Point A to Point B, and reliable electricity at the flick of a switch. We are a silent and tepid bunch, only noticed when something goes awry.

Hollywood doesn’t knock on our door for fodder, which to some degree hampers our ability to open up this profession to the next generation. We don’t live the glitzy life of high-tech. We don’t fight wildfires, bludgeon bad guys with guns, save a 10-year-old girl with an emergency organ transplant, or seek justice for those society has forgotten.

It’s important to me to frame this story from a female POV and with a female protagonist. This profession desperately needs more women, strong women who can bring their own viewpoints and experiences to help shape the future.

I’ve always loved to write — it’s my main avenue for artistic expression. The Medium platform has given me the ability to experiment with different types of writing in a supportive community.

With that said, I present the following; I welcome any comments you may have!

-nova grace❤️

Landslide

Trudging through the wet sticky muck, Sara stopped to catch her breath. Despite her fitness, the weight of the slog on her boots combined with the altitude made her weak. The air was rapidly becoming cooler, causing her breath to vaporize as she steadied her hand against a chunk of concrete on the side of the hill. She dropped the equipment bag, landing on the rubble with a metallic clank.

“You shouldn’t have come” She said to Ben.

“You know you can’t get rid of me this easy” came the reply as Ben rounded the corner of the makeshift pathway. His breath was erratic but not gasping.

She hated that she had both authority and rank to lead her unit, but could not be trusted on the slope without a male partner. Usually it was Blowhard Ben, complete with his male-pattern baldness, unwelcome cocky attitude, weird innuendos and persistent advances. A man with a dick that boastfully had been everywhere but Sara instinctively knew had been nowhere. His continued presence was most likely karma for her sins from a past life.

Someday Sara will be able to decide such matters, and will eagerly, gleefully assign Ellis as her companion. Ellis. Swagger and lightness, intelligence and humor, and a pearly white smile that could cheer up any girls’ day. Although he was objectively attractive, she did not imagine him in a romantic sense, but rather in a platonic way that nonetheless tore at her heart. The difference was perhaps negligible, but to Sara it mattered.

Sara glanced downhill as she regained her breath in the thinning atmosphere. The village was in a haze, with the church steeple and McCarrons hotel barely discernible. The afternoon sun was waning, which only reinforced urgency. The uphill wind threw tendrils of dark hair into her face. She could no longer see the right lobe of the escarpment to the southwest, where hopefully her team were mapping the ground surface and placing their instruments.

“This is silly for you to be here. I can handle this all by myself. I’m not a kid anymore”, she snapped, establishing direct eye contact.

“We’re the same age.” Ben replied, wiping his face with his right sleeve, before picking up the equipment bag. “I’m not a kid anymore either. I don’t make the rules — personally I would rather have stayed at camp.”

Sara looked both uphill and downhill, studying the vegetation. The steepness and erratic topography of the hillside made it difficult to ascertain what was vertical.

“Over there!” Ben shouted, pointing slightly uphill of the next bend in the faint pathway. “the sapling — it’s definitely rotated outwards”.

Sara formed a minor smile. Ordinarily she found his presence incredulous, but at this point exhaustion overruled her pride.

Slowly they climbed to the sapling, shaking off the mud as they climbed off the hill. The observation proved correct, as the plant was on the precipice of a newly formed and deep crevice. Ben shined his flashlight down the void.

“Wazanga! Now that is what we call a tension crack” Ben exclaimed, setting the equipment bag on the ground.

“I know what a tension crack is…” Sara snapped back. “They didn’t make me Captain by flashing my eyelashes”. She hated mansplaining in any form, but especially from Ben, and especially in this situation.

Sara sat on a mound of soil just downhill of the crack, which appeared to extend laterally as far as the fog would allow — at least 25 meters in each direction. The sweat on her skin was becoming cold with the lowering sun.

There wasn’t much time. They both knew that the existence of the crack was not good and everyone downhill was in peril.

Sara grabbed her walkie talkie. “Commander 16. Commander 16. TC on top. I repeat TC on top and moving. Code 1 — Evacuate. I repeat Code 1 — Evacuate!”. Sara repeated the same line two times before acknowledgement.

“Copy Commander 16. We’re proceeding with Code 1. Over”. Sara released the device, dropping onto her equipment bag. She no longer felt particularly human; she defaulted to her intensive training to methodically control her next actions.

“Here, give me the extensometer and you set up the panels.”

“yes ma’am!” Ben replied in a sarcastic tone.

“Dammit, you call me Captain, or nothing at all.” She bit back. She resented Ben following her around, and now she resented that she now needed his help to complete the mission. Utterly embarrassing.

She readied her instrumentation, pushing with all her force using a moderate-sized stone as leverage to manually force the extensometer into the ground. The weight of the stone, her fatigue and the gravelly nature of the regolith made advancement difficult. She estimated the crack was 3 meters deep, so she needed to advance the device at least 4 meters to be able to be able to track the rate and direction of the impending landslide.

“Here, let me help” Ben motioned for her to hand him the stone.

“Dammit I’m doing this.” Sara snapped back, garnering a bit of adrenaline. She scratched an itch on her arm caused by the wet abrasive fabric against her skin. “I can do this. Just get the solar panel and logger box ready.”

This was hell, she thought. Not only was Ben there, but she was reliant on him, and he knew it. Bad judgement to say the least, but bad judgement and Ben were common friends.

They worked in silence, with Sara searching for different rocks to use as makeshift hammers. Five minutes of pounding had sapped the remaining energy from her body. She felt those intense emotions resurfacing.

“Vandais” she breathed, simultaneously wiping her eyes with the back of her right glove. Her thoughts lingered on the village in vague terms; vague terms were all that Sara could muster, lest she tumble into despair about the fate of the quaint villages’ residents.

But there was more than the village at risk — there was Ellis, who by now should have had his equipment firmly set-up on the base of the embankment, and hopefully was off the slope and leading the evacuation. Ellis. The impending peril they both faced challenged her steely resolve.

Five minutes later a rumble of thunder rattled her ears and shook the ground. Sara fell backward, falling on a pointed rock squarely in the middle of her back. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ben falling forward, collapsing and rolling downward with his arms flailing. The thunder increased as the ground shook and moved.

Sara, immobilized, was plastered by rocks and pebbles flying from the sky and from uphill. Frigid cold water seeped instantaneously onto her skin from all directions. The ground, now with a consistency of rocky jello, moved her paralyzed body down the slope, steadily enveloping her.

“ELLIS!” She screamed with incredible intensity, as if it were the last word she would ever muster.

Sara jolted upright in a spasm that engaged all her muscles, her cry echoing. Her eyes revealed nothing but a pitch black nothingness. The air was still.

After ten seconds of confusion Sara reached down, tugged at the covers, and moved her legs to the side of the cot. Sweat covered her face as her heartbeat pounded in her skull. She broke down in tears as her toes curled into the soft wet grassy soil.

To be continued…