Well
A prompt by Ben Kerschberg
I am grateful to Ben Kerschberg for this writing prompt:
Looking up from the bottom of his family's well, the slimy stones that led to freedom seemed even more daunting than the impossibility that faced him.
He’d always been different. The boy with no voice. Mute. “Nothing to say for yourself, loser?”. Kids can be cruel. When you’re from a poor family scratching a living from arid land, there’s no money for private schooling so no hiding place from the things that set you apart. There had been a week or two of grace at the start of term before Mr Chopra sharpened the claws of his cruelty. Questions, questions, all fired his way. “Speak up, boy”—the mocking laughter led by a grown-up who should have known better, eagerly seized upon by the others.
He was the loser who stood alone in a corner of the playground at break time.
He knew every inch of the hallway outside the headteacher’s study. It was a haven from the sharp tongues of his classmates, a place to learn patience—long hours waiting to be punished for a condition the Gods had punished him with. His silence encouraged the head teacher to explore a darker side, the pleasure of corporal punishment stirring the sweaty, pock-faced, power-hungry little man, shortening his rasping breath. “Just our little secret, boy, nothing to tell”.
School holidays were a relief. He could lose himself in chores before escaping to the loft space with his books and the taped-together chess board he practiced on relentlessly. He knew every curve and indentation of the pieces he had made to replace the ones hurled into his family’s neglected fields by his overgrown cousins.
He dreamed of winning moves.
Kings Bishop to C4. Check. A smile on his lips as the Russian Grandmaster realised too late that this quiet kid from India had The Danish Gambit in mind.
His eyes fluttered open and adjusted to the darkness. His neck ached but his gaze was drawn upwards to the circle of light about thirty feet above him. Everything smelled musty and the pervasive damp chill caused an inadvertent shiver. As he looked up from the bottom of his family's well, the slimy stones that led to freedom whispered to him. “Impossible”, they murmured, an unwelcome invitation to stay with them a while, a realisation that evoked a shudder of fear.
It was coming back to him now. The dust cloud in the distance. He had imagined his cousins in the back seat of their parents’ new car, relishing an afternoon spent baiting him while their parents looked down their noses at his. Nothing would be good enough for his aunt and uncle. He, however, would be more than good enough; a perfect punchbag and the ideal butt of their puerile jokes. His instinct had been to hide but they knew his secret places. As the SUV turned off the highway and onto what laughingly passed as his father’s ‘estate’, he panicked. He had lowered himself on trembling arms into the well, his toes scrabbling for a protrusion. The greetings were loud, and rich in forced politeness. He had clung, just out of sight, imagining his auntie’s studied superiority. He heard the boys’ voices, broken, deep, assertive, demanding to know where he was. The shaking in his arms had screamed of his weakness, and his confidence wavered. Even as the trembling in his scrawny thighs found its way to toes that were stretching the generosity of the stone they balanced on, he had a sense that he was in trouble. Real trouble. Not like the beating he would receive from his father or the disappointed sadness in his mother’s eyes when he sidled in long after their visitors had left. Before his brain could find the unspoken words to define ‘trouble’, he had tumbled right into the heart of it.
He heard them calling, the actual words muffled. Perhaps, he wondered, depth changes sound. He had no sounds to offer, no returning call to test a theory. He had read once that terror mutes a person, but what if that person is already silenced? And time. Does time speed up or slow down when you are underground? What about hope? Is there more hope or less far below the surface of the earth?
At that moment, he knew answers to these questions, and others he did not want to contemplate, would be offered to him in the long hours ahead.
I had to look up exactly what ‘A Danish Gambit’ was - no wonder I always lose at chess!
A tender but brutally perceptive cliffhanger story Barrie, so well written too, perhaps I can conjure an ending?
Oh I love how this is left .. 🙏