I’ve described my summer practice of sleeping in my open balcony doorway. The other night, I woke up at about 4:00 a.m. with the full moon poised in the western sky above me, and its light streaming down over me. The light was dazzling and cool, almost a liquid, almost as bright as daylight. When I lifted my hand, it threw a stark shadow onto my bed. I went right back to sleep, but it was pleasant to be sleeping in a bath of moonlight in the summer air. I wished the night weren’t so short!
A random thought about stories, from a discussion I had with a friend this evening: each time a story is read, it is a new thing, don’t you think? It’s new for that reader (assuming it’s a first-time read). The characters rely on that reader to get them through the perils. The settings depend on the reader to sense and complete them with her/his own memories and perceptions. The plot requires the reader to awaken it. The author’s job has been done for a long time when the story has its life. Its life is its interaction with the reader.
Groink! (The sound of changing the subject with a monkey wrench, for any readers who . . .)
I had some fun at work on Friday. The machines went down in the first stretch of the day. They were seriously off-line for a while, so the line bosses put us all on intensive cleanup. Gizmo found me and entrusted me with the steel rake that he never lets far out of his sight. (There is a phantom haunting Greenstar that devours tools. We used to have several steel rakes; now there’s just the one that Gizmo guards and uses.)
First, he set me to cleaning out a space beneath some machinery that is very much like a cave. You can only enter bent double. He wanted me to rake out the trash, as I’ve done before (I think that’s why he recruited me). Cans, bottles, and bits of other junk lie in a putty of thick dust and grime that resembles soil. The hard pieces glitter in the dark like minerals in a real cave. “Drag it out,” Gizmo told me. “Leave the dirt. Make a line right here.” So I did. In that cave, I left nothing but the rich black grime-soil, with no more glitter.
Then Gizmo set me to dragging out a pile from an even smaller cave. Then he put me to work raking the cans out from behind a steel shield around a belt. I would finish these jobs, and he’d react in happy amazement that I was done so soon, that the places were so clean: “You are the MAN!” (I don’t think he’s used to having hard workers who understand instructions at his disposal.)
The best work of all he found for me was this: I got to climb a ladder, still bearing the sacred rake of steel, and deep and high in the shadowy netherworld, I threw down all the accumulated cans and bottles from a catwalk. But my real job was to clear away the shreds of plastic bags that hung from railings, from girders, from the maws of hoppers, from the sides of the engines themselves. It was very much like clearing away ancient cobwebs. I found among those dim spaces trash that had been there so long it was covered by a full inch of dust, and I saw it first only as outlines. I daresay that catwalk and its surroundings became cleaner than they’d been in years.
Then a whole crew of us worked on removing the detritus I’d flung down. Using wheelbarrows and push brooms, we pushed and wheeled it to the Great Mountain at the rear of the building — the pile of unsorted trash that rises from the concrete floor perhaps twenty feet into the air and covers about an acre. As I was dumping out a wheelbarrow, My Man the Rat jumped out right at my feet and scurried away to my right. I showed him to Ralph.
Gizmo sent me into a very narrow space to rake out trash that hadn’t been touched in a long time. I think that’s where I got into some grease that I doubt will ever come out of my shirt. I hadn’t intended to ruin that shirt, but it’s a work shirt now. As Ralph said, “That shirt is committed.” Punkin came along and called me back out of the space. “You’ll wake up those rats back in there,” he said. “That’s where they live.” Ralph said, “We don’t want to wake up the cousins.” There are older and viler things than orcs in the deep places of Greenstar . . . things that ought not to be disturbed.
At about that time, the cry came ’round: “Yo! We’re back up! Yo! We’re up!” The machines were fixed, the gears turning again. I found Gizmo, who’s easy to find because of his merry voice and his gesticulating. I presented him with his steel rake and had the pleasure of telling him what he did not yet know: “I guess we’re back up.” He almost bowed to me. He patted me on the back and blessed me and my progeny.
Gizmo, you see, has often called me “the second-happiest man on the planet.” The happiest is a young guy nicknamed Africa, who smiles constantly. A smile is my default expression, but I don’t smile, for example, when the garbage smells vile and the belt is piled deep and running at full tilt. Then it’s hold fast, lads, spray and pray!
Things ran smoothly for the rest of the day. But it was nice having that morning stretch to move around and rake things, to knock on the rats’ doors and clear away the cobwebs.
I’ve been trying to figure out how the three stretches of our shift might be tied to the old canonical hours, but I’m not sure how to do it. We have a 7:00-9:30 stretch, which is by far the hardest to get through. For some reason, it seems interminable. Then there’s the half-hour morning break. Then 10:00-12:00 working, and lunch from noon until 12:30. Then we work from 12:30 to 2:30, when the engines stop. Then we clean up until about 2:45 or 2:50, when we sign out. So are the stretches Lauds, Terce, and Sext? I’m not sure how to work it out. Suggestions are welcome.
Slow progress on the book lately, since a lot has been going on during weekends. But I’ll get there, Lord willing. It’s a great summer. And since I have no summer vacation, this year the summer can follow the sun and stars, and go on and on until the leaves turn, the air crispens, and it’s clearly fall. But now, it’s summer — the dog days are here! Let us bask in the moonlight and brown our bare feet in the sun!
Jedibabe says: 
fsdthreshold 
Morwenna 
Hagiograph 
Scott