I’m writing this at a very late hour and I need to be up ridiculously early tomorrow. Forgive me any ramblings, typos, or grammar mistakes. Short form seems to be the way to go for me right now, so I’ve been looking more closely into flash fiction and what goes into it. This is my first deliberate attempt at a short short.

Rain Drops

The lineman Timothy Grafton died yesterday at 2:30 PM while fixing a downed powerline in the mountains.  The day had been hot and sweat flowed freely into the eyes.  The portions of the view of the Inland Empire that weren’t hidden by southern California’s ever-present smog layer were obscured by low hanging clouds high in the mountains.  These diffused the sun’s light so the linemen didn’t have to squint to see the destruction the wildfire had inflicted.  Occasional patches of vegetation had been spared, but where once there had been unimpeded swathes of chaparral there were now forests of their resilient blackened skeletons, or nothing but black and white ash.  Clouds of this fine material swirled upward with every step.  If a nose was blown, the mucus was black.  The sounds of chainsaws echoed through the canyons as skeletons were cleared in preparation for replacing the powerlines snapped by the fire. 

Timothy Grafton had been a lineman for three years.  He came to southern California from Kansas with an English degree and dreams of screenwriting.  Like so many others he found the ephemeral glint of tinsel impossible to grasp.  To make himself more interesting, he took a job as a lineman, thinking that working in the scenic and rugged mountains sounded romantic.  His fellow lineman considered Timothy slightly dangerous.  He would often stare into the distance, forgetting the high-voltage transmission lines he was working on.  He once asked a co-worker about the buzzing coming from the line above their heads. 

“Miguel, what do you think the buzzing sounds like?”

“Buzzing,” Miguel replied through his sandwich. 

“No, I mean it sort of sounds like an insect.” 

“Insects buzz, dude,” Miguel stated. 

“But not really.  There’s a different quality to it.  Something familiar. I just can’t put my finger on it.  Maybe flags flapping in the wind?” 

Miguel closed his eyes sighed.  “It’s just buzzing.” 

“Buzzing is such a…common way to describe it though.  There has to be a better way.” 

Miguel rolled his eyes.  “Just be sure to remember how many volts those flapping flags carry.” 

On the day he died, Timothy was high in the mountains, cutting down skeletons beneath a buzzing high-voltage transmission line.  He suddenly stopped and stared into the distance for several moments, his chainsaw halfway through a skeleton near the edge of a steep slope. 

He whirled around.  “Miguel, I figured it out!  The buzzing sounds like raindrops falling through leaves!  I’ve been thinking its raining for-” 

The loose ash beneath Timothy’s heavy work boots shifted.  He lost his balance and went tumbling down the slope.  His white hardhat flew off into the air, landing far down the slope and rolling down the blackened hill to the creek channel 200 feet below.  He hit some exposed boulders before his journey was violently arrested when a branch impaled him, tearing his aorta. 

It took the other linemen half an hour to recover his body safely.  They shook their heads when they placed his soot-stained, bloody body in the back of a truck to start the forty-minute drive down the narrow, winding mountain road to meet the coroner’s van.  Work to fix the powerlines continued because air conditioners and computers do not run on hopes and dreams.