been Kellan who dropped me. No explanation or apologies for why he’d decided to ignore my existence. That had been true heartbreak. There couldn’t have been any other explanation for the bitter, sickening feeling that’d invaded my entire body and soul when Kellan turned away from me. It had made leaving Bluefield that much easier.
Two pigeons eyed me optimistically for a lunch treat as I sat on the park bench. I pulled out my cell phone. There was only one person who I could think I wanted to talk to, and the second I heard his deep, confident voice I crumpled into a distraught, little girl. “Daddy, it’s me. It’s all gone to hell here. I’m ready to come back home.”
Chapter 3
Kellan
I scooted several feet along the rock floor. The ribs in the shaft were no more than four feet high leaving me little brow room to move without crowning my miner’s cap on the roof. On days like today, after hours spent hunched over and on my knees, the black dusty chamber felt suffocating. Occasionally, if I thought too much about the tons of earth surrounding me, if I let the impossible physics of it all get into my head, my work space would close in on me and a moment of complete panic, a grim sense that I’d been buried alive would grab me. During those fleeting moments of uneasiness, I had trouble facing the bleak reality that much of my adult life would be spent below the surface of the earth where sunlight was as foreign as fresh air. In other instances, when I’d finished securing a mined out section, leaving behind a safer vault for others to walk through, I would feel calmed by the solid feel of the underground passages, the maze of coal pillars, the sense that I was walking in the same footsteps as my dad and granddad, holding up the family tradition.
A fine spray of black dust covered my safety goggles as the bolt twisted through rock. It was the final roof bolt of the morning. Dawson, my work partner and long time best friend, signaled that he was finished. He pulled off his knee pads and headed out to the gallery. The gallery passageway led to the underground station where the lunch tables were set up.
Dawson and I had both grown up on the south side of town, although, technically, it wasn’t so much south as it was below the railroad tracks. The tracks moonlighted as a long border of steel and wood that cut the south side shabby neighborhoods apart from the wealthy end of Bluefield. Dawson had grown up with three sisters, an iron-fisted dad and little else. We’d managed to get into a fucking lot of trouble on our journey to adulthood, and we weren’t all that great at avoiding it now, even at the ripe old age of twenty-five. But we always had each other’s backs. Aside from the obvious choice of a Victoria’s Secret model, there wasn’t anyone else on the planet I could think of who I’d want to be trapped in a mineshaft with, if that was an ugly fate I ever faced. A rock fall at this depth would make rescue difficult and survival for long unlikely. So I’d decided long ago that I was lucky to have Dawson with me. If I had to die a slow, agonizing death of suffocation, I wanted my best buddy to be right next to me cracking jokes until the end.
Dawson and I were in charge of moving in behind the continuous mining machine and its operators to secure the roof of the cleared sections. A dangerous job but one I was glad to do next to Dawson.
The light on my helmet glowed down over the dial as the torque wrench reached the proper pressure amount. The bearing plate was set. My machinery hissed and sighed as I shut it down.
My stomach grumbled with hunger as I crouched beneath the brow and found my way to the gallery where I was able to straighten my legs and back for the first time since I’d stepped off the man trip, the low profile vehicle that carried the miners down to the work sections.
I unbuckled my knee pads and tossed them over my shoulder. I traveled along the haulage way, the long
Two pigeons eyed me optimistically for a lunch treat as I sat on the park bench. I pulled out my cell phone. There was only one person who I could think I wanted to talk to, and the second I heard his deep, confident voice I crumpled into a distraught, little girl. “Daddy, it’s me. It’s all gone to hell here. I’m ready to come back home.”
Chapter 3
Kellan
I scooted several feet along the rock floor. The ribs in the shaft were no more than four feet high leaving me little brow room to move without crowning my miner’s cap on the roof. On days like today, after hours spent hunched over and on my knees, the black dusty chamber felt suffocating. Occasionally, if I thought too much about the tons of earth surrounding me, if I let the impossible physics of it all get into my head, my work space would close in on me and a moment of complete panic, a grim sense that I’d been buried alive would grab me. During those fleeting moments of uneasiness, I had trouble facing the bleak reality that much of my adult life would be spent below the surface of the earth where sunlight was as foreign as fresh air. In other instances, when I’d finished securing a mined out section, leaving behind a safer vault for others to walk through, I would feel calmed by the solid feel of the underground passages, the maze of coal pillars, the sense that I was walking in the same footsteps as my dad and granddad, holding up the family tradition.
A fine spray of black dust covered my safety goggles as the bolt twisted through rock. It was the final roof bolt of the morning. Dawson, my work partner and long time best friend, signaled that he was finished. He pulled off his knee pads and headed out to the gallery. The gallery passageway led to the underground station where the lunch tables were set up.
Dawson and I had both grown up on the south side of town, although, technically, it wasn’t so much south as it was below the railroad tracks. The tracks moonlighted as a long border of steel and wood that cut the south side shabby neighborhoods apart from the wealthy end of Bluefield. Dawson had grown up with three sisters, an iron-fisted dad and little else. We’d managed to get into a fucking lot of trouble on our journey to adulthood, and we weren’t all that great at avoiding it now, even at the ripe old age of twenty-five. But we always had each other’s backs. Aside from the obvious choice of a Victoria’s Secret model, there wasn’t anyone else on the planet I could think of who I’d want to be trapped in a mineshaft with, if that was an ugly fate I ever faced. A rock fall at this depth would make rescue difficult and survival for long unlikely. So I’d decided long ago that I was lucky to have Dawson with me. If I had to die a slow, agonizing death of suffocation, I wanted my best buddy to be right next to me cracking jokes until the end.
Dawson and I were in charge of moving in behind the continuous mining machine and its operators to secure the roof of the cleared sections. A dangerous job but one I was glad to do next to Dawson.
The light on my helmet glowed down over the dial as the torque wrench reached the proper pressure amount. The bearing plate was set. My machinery hissed and sighed as I shut it down.
My stomach grumbled with hunger as I crouched beneath the brow and found my way to the gallery where I was able to straighten my legs and back for the first time since I’d stepped off the man trip, the low profile vehicle that carried the miners down to the work sections.
I unbuckled my knee pads and tossed them over my shoulder. I traveled along the haulage way, the long
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