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Ruthie Toombs, author of Feeding the Need & The Deviant Memoirs

Forgotten Deep...a novella ©

Ruthie Toombs
3/1/12 (Teaser-Pub-pending)

            The Thompsons lived just a few miles down the gravel road from where that little girl started to grow up. They were basically neighbors, but for some reason their end of the road always got the potholes filled in with sand after a hard rain and the little girl’s didn’t. Anyway, the Thompsons decided they wanted to build themselves a swimming hole. To that girl, the dry hole in the red, Missouri clay looked more like an asteroid had left a scar a mile wide on the desolate landscape, but what did she know. 
What those Thompsons didn’t know was there was a silent, powerful vortex under the backhoes and earthmovers, and any moisture at the surface was sucked below and into the unknown. The whirlpool was mightier than the diesel-fueled equipment and even the showy Thompson’s soulless desire for bigger and better.
And each time those Thompson’s searched the dusty basin from the floor-to-ceiling window in their den (the little girl didn’t even know such a room existed!) to see if it was holding water, they would shake their heads in utter frustration at their misfortune.
 Those Thompsons moved after a few months of trying to best the monstrous crater. They grew tired of picking up handfuls of dust and letting the wind catch it while running never before soiled hands through their hair.
 In fact, the little girl watched them go that day, bare-toed and black-footed, hanging on a splintered wood post. They dragged their sleek, new motorboat behind, reminding her a lot of a shamed dog with its tail tucked between hind legs. It made her a bit sad really; knowing the fine, silvery machine had never felt the soft caress of gentle currents tossed against its sides.
In fact, even though she had no life experiences to really draw upon, the little girl understood the pain of faceless loss.  The cost of never getting to experience a strange wonderful, but yet somehow knowing the sweetness missed out on.  
Just after those Thompsons moved away a bunch of hoodlum kids with nothing better to do set fire to an old mattress in the middle of that beautiful home overlooking the empty lake.  A lot of folks started talking and said those Thompsons torched it on purpose to try and cash in on such a money thrashing. I suppose it didn’t really matter considering they were long gone and couldn’t hear the jealous gossip anyway.
 The little girl knew what happened.
 She saw the teenagers, smoking and cursing, dousing the piss-stained cushion with kerosene. Watched them scatter like roaches under unexpected light when the flames got too high. She even found some of the empty beer bottles while treading carefully through the smoldering remains the next day, sniffing each neck hole individually, believing she could smell their breath still trapped inside.
That little girl was an odd one and most people would step to the side of the gravel road when she passed, barefoot and humming a haunting melody that only she knew.
She was always barefoot, and a bit odd, but that little girl saw things.
She was the first to see the machine too.
It was just one, neglected appliance.
In fact, it was a lonely, old wringer washer, its days of squashing cloth diapers and overalls a thing put to rest. It had been dumped square in the middle of that thirsty, red bowl, shimmering under the glare of midseason heat.
The washer wasn’t lonely for very long though, and before the sun rose on another day, a pair of tractor tires, the belts protruding in ugly bulges, joined it.  Then there was a hay-thresher missing three or four of its prongs, a juicer with its rusty fangs frozen wide, seeming to wait for the next grapefruit that would never come.
There was even a spokeless unicycle.
As the summertime waxed hot and sticky on into August, the waterless sea became a sort of graveyard, housing those things forgotten.
 And those things not.