{"id":6656,"date":"2015-04-01T21:00:45","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T03:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=6656"},"modified":"2015-04-01T21:00:45","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T03:00:45","slug":"the-people-of-the-pit","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=6656","title":{"rendered":"The People of the Pit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Scott<\/strong><\/p>\n

The people of the pit didn\u2019t understand why they had to die.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe black pit,\u201d Somebody said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy\u2019s it gotta be black,\u201d Somebody Else said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I can\u2019t see you,\u201d Somebody said.<\/p>\n

Nobody could see anybody, but everybody had heard the news loud and clear. It came from above, from crackling old speakers, an old man\u2019s voice. It said that death was upon the people of the pit and the lives they knew didn\u2019t matter, but the lives that they thought they were going to know, no death could take that away. The voice coughed, the speakers buzzed a moment, and then everything was gone.<\/p>\n

Somebody Else said, \u201cFuck that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somebody said, \u201cI\u2019m with ya.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somebody Else and Somebody pushed through the sea of everybody. Some of the members of the sea would say excuse me or pardon me and some of them would shout an exaggerated ouch, or \u201cfuck you, pal.\u201d Some of them wept. After a while of pushing, the sea wouldn\u2019t yield, and it didn\u2019t feel like people anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s mud,\u201d Somebody said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m already climbing it,\u201d Somebody Else said.<\/p>\n

When they were both up about ten feet, clawing and clinging, finding strength they never knew they had, they stopped. Somebody Else and Somebody felt each other\u2019s thought, or they each thought they felt each other\u2019s thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey,\u201d Somebody Else shouted to the sea, \u201cIt\u2019s a scalable wall.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCome on,\u201d Somebody shouted. He channeled the great battle cries of movies he\u2019d seen, the energy of Hollywood\u2019s William Wallace, Robin Hood, Leonidas . . . \u201cWe climb!\u201d<\/p>\n

Uneasy silence.<\/p>\n

Then the people of the pit shouted back. They shouted they couldn\u2019t find the wall, they couldn\u2019t grab the wall, they couldn\u2019t shit anywhere, there\u2019s no place to shit!? And they couldn\u2019t see anything, and they couldn\u2019t think. Then they started yelling shut up at Somebody Else and Somebody. Then they were yelling shut up at everybody else.<\/p>\n

Somebody Else and Somebody continued climbing by themselves. As they climbed, their muscles became sore and they thought of letting go, and they thought maybe the sea would catch them. They weren\u2019t sure, but maybe if they kept going they could go so high they\u2019d die from the fall. They\u2019d be too tired to climb up or down and they\u2019d be trapped. What did they do? They climbed.<\/p>\n

They couldn\u2019t credit courage for this direction. Their bodies had found a mechanical rhythm. As much as their brains fired fear to their chests, the mechanics of their arms and legs pushed, pulled, reset, pushed, pulled, reset.<\/p>\n

After a while, they couldn\u2019t hear the sea. Not knowing how far they had climbed and not knowing how far they had to go, they were alone in space, in a whole other reality, in a reality that had nowhere to stand or rest. Above and below them were death and the unknown, and in front of them was mud to cling to, but was it mud? They wondered for a moment what the hell was mud. They wondered for a moment what the word vertical really meant. What bullshit is the difference between vertical and horizontal? The mud in front of them and the empty space behind them: it was all the same.<\/p>\n

Somebody farted.<\/p>\n

Somebody Else laughed, and then Somebody laughed with him. They were still real, they both thought.<\/p>\n

Sometime between forever and yesterday, they each swung their hands up and missed the wall. There wasn\u2019t any more wall to grab. They pulled and pushed themselves up and stumbled into a new reality of flat land — a floor of mud and a pit of mud behind them. About twenty yards out, there was a light post illuminating nothing but itself and the ground around it. They went to it without a thought about what it meant. They just wanted light.<\/p>\n

In the first light that they had seen in days, Somebody saw Somebody Else and Somebody Else saw Somebody.<\/p>\n

Somebody Else was a big black guy. Somebody was a big white guy. They were men that worked out hard and often. They felt instantly the camaraderie of muscled men. They shook hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cJonathan,\u201d Somebody Else said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell shit,\u201d Somebody said, \u201cThat\u2019s my name, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

They smiled at each other for a while. They looked back toward the pit, but it was hidden in the darkness. It was all flat land it seemed now, but the sound of the pit, the crowd with nowhere to shit, came to them like a whisper. Did they care? They weren\u2019t sure, yet. They looked back at each other, still smiling.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re free,\u201d Jonathan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShould we save them?\u201d Jonathan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFuck! Because they\u2019re people, because you have a chance to be heroes, because you\u2019re not even free yet!\u201d<\/p>\n

They both looked up and saw the crackling speaker wired to the light post.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll go by Jon,\u201d the black guy said. \u201cYou go by Jonathan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRight,\u201d the white guy said. \u201cNow let\u2019s do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShit,\u201d the somebody in the speaker said.<\/p>\n

JOE SCOTT<\/strong> is from Wichita, KS. He currently lives in Seattle, WA. His fiction has appeared in Arcadia<\/em>, Midwest Literary Magazine<\/em>, and Short, Fast & Deadly<\/em>. He is also a prep cook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Scott The people of the pit didn\u2019t understand why they had to die. \u201cThe black pit,\u201d Somebody said. \u201cWhy\u2019s it gotta be black,\u201d Somebody Else said. \u201cBecause I can\u2019t see you,\u201d Somebody said. Nobody could see anybody, but everybody … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":6654,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6656","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-1Jm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6663,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6656\/revisions\/6663"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}