Friday Five April 9th

So, this time I’m giving Friday Five another try. This week’s words are: hell, railroad, chief, abridge, past

The obelisks burst up out of nowhere, where the railroad used to be, past where my cousin used to live. We called the police chief but we doubted there was anything he could do. There had been several cases of these obelisks popping up out of the ground in the last few months. The fact that it happened out here in our little town frightened me. What were the chances? 

I wasn’t keen to go, but my sister and her boyfriend begged me. Since her car had been repossessed and he had a suspended license, that left me. My sister asked to borrow my car, but she doesn’t have the world’s most reliable track record. When I picked up Shirley and Stan, he already smelled strongly of alcohol. He was a friendly drunk, never mean, but that didn’t change the facts. But this wasn’ t  the time to have another lifestyle management meeting with Shirley and Stan. 

I pushed the pedal to the metal, so they say, eager to get where we needed to go. 

“We need to get pictures of it,” Stan said from the backseat. “We need proof.”

“We will,” Shirl eysaid confidently. She was sitting beside me, with her seatbelt on, but straining her neck to look out the front window as if something or someone would jump out in front of us. Of course, given the state of things in this county lately, that might very well happen. 

We were not the first ones to arrive. Everyone parked by the side of the road and headed across the field towards the obelisk. Any minute now, state authorities were bound to show up. Stan had jumped out of the car before I even unbuckled my seat belt and was racing across the grass. Shirley was right behind him. I was slower, like always, but I managed. I locked the car-because I had common sense- and made sure I had my wallet and my phone on me. I walked briskly, rather than running like a fool. I didn’t trust what might be in the grass in the middle of the night. 

The truth was, I was terrified. Everyone was acting as if the obelisks were some wondrous event. A Nobel winner in physics was on the news everyday talking about it. I’d even bought her book-well the abridged version for the layman. I didn’t understand a word of it.  Twitter had all the conspiracy theories known to man and even the president tweeted the possibility of alien contact. I’d love to be the optimistic, but I’d seen things in my life that proved otherwise. 

The closer I got, the larger the obelisk, looked. My heart began to race and my palms were sweating. The feeling of panic gripped me, and I thought about fleeing. There were hills of dirt were the object had pushed up out of the ground, and a few were trying to climb it sliding back down. The closer I got I noticed the foul smell and the dirt-like dog droppings and winced. How could they stand it? 

I walked towards to the obelisk, near enough to touch it, but I didn’t dare. It was smooth, but as I looked closer, I noticed the sketching on the sides that looked like faces. Round faces, oval faces, square faces; all with wide opened eyes and wide open mouths and no noses. Liquid dripped down the sides, as red as blood, and I backed away. My blood ran cold; my hands shook. The obelisk began to move, getting taller, pushing more of the earth up. The man on the dirt hill fell over and sank into the mass. People began to scream. This thing was coming up to us from the bowels of hell and there was nothing we could do to stop it. 

To be continued

Copyright 2021 Echo Ishii