s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Once upon a time there was a woman. Let’s call her…. Aramat. She worked as an… engineer in a… power plant. Yes, a power plant. Then she moved to a different city, and found herself a job with a different power plant.

There were new people at the new power plant, which was much bigger than the old one. Ta– Aramat was excited to start the new job. She took the train to work and presented herself to her new employers.

“Here is the power plant !” they said, pointing to a jumble of buildings of uncertain architectural pedigree crisscrossed by heavy power lines, one of which may have been a power plant.

Aramat nodded sagely, and asked sage, relevant questions.

“It runs on coal !” they told her.

Aramat raised an eyebrow (see, this couldn’t be a thinly veiled story about *me*, because I’m in no way clever enough to raise only one eyebrow at a time), thinking this was not a terribly modern sort of power plant, for all it was large and apparently prosperous. But she was new on the job, so she simply nodded and smiled. “I see.”

“There is the coal mine,” they said brightly, pointing to a dark hole in the ground from which issued noxious fumes and the bitter laughter of coal miners, accompanied by faint, repetitive scraping sounds. “The power plant is new, and I suppose it’s not very efficient, because it needs a lot of coal. Lugar’s already down there — he can show you where the seam is.”

“What ?” Aramat began, perplexed. “I don’t under–”

“I think there’s an extra spoon down there.”

“A what ?”

“To dig the coal with. But it belongs to another miner who’s gone off to a course in Australia to learn all about the different kinds of coal, so you’ll have to give it back in a couple weeks. Oh, and we’ve put in a order to get you a torch so you’ll have a bit of light to dig by — diggings easier with a bit of light, isn’t it ? — but the order’s gone Upstairs, so it’ll be a few months, or maybe forever –” they wave a hand airly “– before it comes in.”

Aramat simply smiled, stupidly, too jetlagged and bemused to do much more. “A… spoon ?”

“In you go. Have fun !”

And they pushed her into the hole.