Hi All,
I'm aiming my story to the "Harry Potter" readers but the story is nothing like HP. SO with my courage mustered up I'm putting this snippet here for your review.
~WAKE-UP ! Wake-up, wake-up, Get Up !~ Tom’s eyes snapped open. Clearing his thoughts, he remembered the recording he ‘d made the day before to be sure he got up early enough to get everything that he planned done today.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up now.” He slammed his hand down on the alarm player to make it shut up. “I gotta hurry over to Old Lady Sims’s place to get that court ordered work out of the way” he was thinking. “Dumb judge never even let me explain that the dog I was caught kicking really deserved it. That dumb dog has bitten just about everybody in town and it just shoved its stupid head through the fence and bit me. No way was I about to let it get away with that. And that stupid Cop Cooper just had to be there when I lost it all over that idiot dog. ‘Ten hours community service ought to teach you not to abuse animals.’ He mocked, “The worst of it is that my Dad agrees with ‘em.”
“Getting this done in the morning will give me just enough time to get to the ballpark to pitch the game this afternoon.” Checking his watch and startling at the quick passing of time he jumped into his clothes and raced through the kitchen grabbing his jacket and jamming a stale sweet roll between his teeth. Bursting out the back door he let it slam shut as he set his jogging pace down the road. Loping along at a pretty good pace wasn’t quick enough for Tom and as he came along Sara’s farm the idea of cutting across her hayfield was too tempting. He hopped over the fence without even losing a stride and started out across the green hay. Nearly to the other side the earth suddenly gave way beneath him and he tumbled through a dark hole in the ground. “Aw shit” echoed off the walls as a pile of old moldy hay broke his fall. Getting his eyes to adjust to the darkness he strained to get a look around, “Where am I? What is this place? ”
A beam of daylight streamed through the hole he had just traveled through giving him just enough light to see that the hole he was in was certainly an old barn of some kind. He caught sight of some ropes hanging from the rafters and decided to climb one to try and get out just the way he’d come in. Grabbing the sturdiest looking one he tugged it to test it and began his climb. His had a skinny build for a 12 year old and wiry like so many boys this age. This didn’t make the task any easier as he swung around and bashed himself against first a stone wall then splintered siding, then a scraped hard against a metal thing with teeth. “OW, crap!’ he shouted as the teeth on the metal thing bit into the flesh of his pitching hand and he let go of the rope, tumbling him back to the floor.
Looking up he saw the rope, the hole in the rafters and some old corroded metal beast. He scrambled to his feet and reached out to touch the thing. A crusty disc immediately came loose in his hand. “Cripes” He exclaimed turning it over in his hands as right before his eyes it began to turn shinier and shinier until it regained a new luster. In his surprise he dropped it and lets it clang to the floor where it returned to its old corroded status. “What the heck. What’s goin’ on here?” With his shoe he gave it a shove back toward the metal beasty thing. “I gotta get outta here.” He grabbed the big rope again and hand over hand made it to the rafters where he scrabbled his way through the same hole he had dropped through a bit ago. Looking at his watch he jumped up and set out across the field without looking back.
Arriving at the old Sims Farm he calls out, “Mrs. Sims, Mrs. Sims, are you up yet?”
“Back here Tom,” came a faint voice.
He ran around the house to find her standing in front a huge pile of garden cuttings. “I’ll burn this while you take these pots into the shed.” She turned and saw his hand scraped and blood crusted. “What happened here?” She asked turning his palm over in her gnarly knuckled hands.
“Nothing, I just scraped it on some old barb wire.” He said snatching his hand back.
“Go wash up under the hose and I’ll get a band aid for that deep cut. Then you can hoe up the rows in the vegetable patch. That will take most of the day.”
“But, wait” Tom protested “I got to pitch the game right after lunch.”
“Well, OK, can you come back later this afternoon and get a good start on my hoeing? Then you can finish it up on Sunday if you like, but I won’t sign your court paper until I get a full ten hours outta you.”
“Yeah, yeah, OK, I understand all that.” He said. As he went to work with the hoe and the garden dirt his thoughts turned back to the ground hole he had fallen through. “Damn, that fall cost me a good hour. I wonder what that thing is anyway and what’s it doing hidden in a hole in the ground?”
Tom tried to concentrate on the game he was planning to pitch; how to hold and twist the ball with each throw. His performance this afternoon was critical. The baseball coach had reluctantly allowed him to pitch this game due to the team’s regular pitcher’s absence. It was his chance to really prove himself.
He badly needed to excel at something. He was only average at studies. He was not musically talented nor was he outstanding in any sport like football and his Dad regularly told him he would never amount to much. The hard part of Tom’s young life was that his mother had died in a car accident a few years ago hit by a drunk driver on her way home. She had worked the midnight shift at the convenience gas station nearby. Now without a Mom to support and encourage him and his dad almost always gone working, he was having a difficult time finding his way on his own.
The episode with the dog was just one place where parental guidance was missing. It seemed right to him to kick the snot of the mean old dog at the machine shop where he would get old parts to fix crippled lawnmower or some other household machinery that decided to quit without notice.
This is my freshly written first draft but I thought I'd get some review before I get a lot of pages down. I know I've got some grammer polishing to do but I'm braced and ready for your eyes and comments.
mary
