Sketches 1
SKETCHES is an ongoing series where I will post bits of what I am writing at the moment, ideas for other stories, or anything else that strikes my fancy. Essentially, a written version of an artist’s sketchbook. Today’s sketch is an unused bit of story from a syfy serial I’m working on called Death Meks.
My tired mind wandered as I trekked along. It meandered back to winters past when I would spend time in that old workshop with the old man I called Pap, or grandpap, or Daddy-pap. His graying beard flecked with brown and his gunmetal-gray eyes and torn and calloused hands. He didn’t smile or talk or pat my head. Just worked. And I would watch him. I’d drink it in, his hands a whirl of motion, but with each movement having a purpose and plan, like dancers’ feet. He moved swiftly from work station to work station, advancing to the next project at the first tickle of boredom. He could never be stumped by a problem, there was nothing beyond the fanatical grasp of his fertile mind. If he was slowed in any way, for any reason, he would simply pick up something else and begin working on it, all the while solving the previous quandary somewhere in the recesses of his brain. His eyes would be fixed on the work in front of him, but behind those twin dark moons, a solution was being grinded out of rocks of uncertainty. Two, maybe three at a time. Maybe hundreds, who knew? His workbenches holding a collection of wires and circuits, digital screens and toolboxes. Paints, ceramics, kilns, canvas, stone, journals, jars, schematics, medicines, and a host of other relics lost in the swirling sea of my memory, some recalled only just now in my half-sleep journey through the dark.
Grandpap had the presence of a black hole, magnificent, mysterious, and powerful. But he was also destructive and wild—those around him would be sucked into his titanic pull, only to be destroyed if journeying too close to his center. He was more than a grandfather to me, more than a father to my Papa. He was indescribable because he was unknowable, which, I imagine, is why I was so drawn to him as a child. It was like staring into the sun—you knew you would one day burn your eyes out, but you didn’t care because the brilliance was worth it. The mystery. But it was also more than that. Something deeper and more primitive. Beneath the workshop and the circuitry and the paintings and the tobacco and the peppermint and the disorienting gaze resided a man who terrified me. A grandpap I could never trust, which I knew as a child in the only the way a child can know.
“Poppycock,” I said. But it was true. That man would kill if he needed to, like all black holes do. Maybe that was his purpose, to be a creator and destroyer all wrapped into one unknowable package of dark power threatening to come unhinged at any moment. But in my mind’s eye, there he stood, calm and unmoving, except for those magic hands dancing their dance to the mysterious music that played only in his perplexing mind. That was when the realization set in for the first time.
I was willingly going to see this man.
I would stand face to face with him—me no longer the tiny child sitting on a stool in his workshop, while he was still, no doubt, the carnivorous craftsman he always had been. Each step I took brought me closer to his half-forgotten shop where he toiled away. But why go? I’ve been asking myself that for many miles now. Why stare into the sun? Why venture into a black hole? Well, the answer was obvious, wasn’t it? Because you can’t help yourself.
