Authors Anonymous: Ruins

Coaches instructions: Write about coming across some unexpected ruins. You'll find my story below:

It sounded like a cannon. Not like the whisper of 16th century artillery, its ear-piercing scream was like the roar of the Mark 7 16inch guns blasted from the bowels of an Iowan class battleship.

The recoil from the .50 caliber was so powerful that the 2nd shot propelled me a full foot and a half, and I hit so hard against the wall I was afraid I was going to black out. I remained standing and snarled victoriously at my archenemy lying at my feet.

I saw my husband but couldn’t hear him, as I was still temporally deaf. He quickly glanced me over from head to foot, at the gun in my hand and then at floor. He looked at me slowly this time checking to see if I had been hurt.

I watched him halt the men from entering into our bath suite, his guards were only a fraction of a second slower than my husband was in coming to my aid. He closed the door. The sound was coming back to my ears, but for now all I could hear was ringing.

“I’m tired of these wild accusations.” I screamed that declaration I know that I did because I felt it in my chest but my hearing still betrayed me. Fahyim, pronounced Faw-heem looked down at the scale, which was now in a thousand smoldering pieces.

“That brutal instrument is the creation of the Devil.” I heard myself that time but I sounded far away. Nothing said I love you more than the way my husband was looking at me now. He told me all the time in seven languages how much he loved me, but it was this look that hammered it home.

I meet him in France; on our 1st date he flew me to have lunch in a city with a stunning view of the Arabian Sea, he proposed in Germany and we spent six months living in the US and six months in Iran. I married into a very affluent and powerful family, second only to the royal one.

I had been engaged in trench warfare with that damn scale since the birth of our twins two years ago and I was losing ground with frightening speed. His smiled melted me. He glided across the mosaic tiles with the grace of a dancer and the way he was looking at me then let me know he didn’t mind the extra.

I fell asleep on the bathroom floor but I woke up in bed but I wished I were still on the cool tiled floor. I was hot and sticky; spending the summer months in Iran was like vacationing in the fourth level of Hell. It was only May 11 in the morning and 93 degrees.

I was only out of the shower for five minutes before I started sweating again. I followed my children’s laughter into the kitchen. Sameer and Sameera where playing and chasing their cousins who were 4 and 6 around and the nanny was near tears. They we’re all going to the zoo today and in there excitement lunch was all but ignored.

After getting the children feed and out the door I went to check on the renovations. The East wing of our palace-sized home had been unused for almost 30 years and the space I was given to remodel was a 2700 square foot space with a tile and glass dome top – I was having it turned into my own private indoor rain forest.

The foundation and been dug up to accommodate my heated pool that snaked around my oasis like the Amazon River. My husband imported fragrant tress from Asia and Africa that were now tall enough to filter the sun. Tropical birds and butterflies were brought from Malaysia and Peru and last week I saw a python.

The grounds keeper, who was hired to stay on top of the butterfly and frog population, assured me that he was harmless and explained that since it was hand fed that it would not grow larger than 12 feet or so.

Last year I encountered what I believed was a leopard. It scared the shit out of me and I fled into the arms of Fayhim, who was just as started as I was by the sighting. Later we found out that the jungle cat was an Ashera, a large exotic housecat that had cost $20,000.00 courtesy of the emissary of evil – my mother-in-law. Both cats had been declawed for my safety, but that idea was not my MIL’s favorite.

I was in my 7th year of remodeling and my current project was incorporating two “natural” springs. One pool was to be fresh water to discourage the cats and birds from the drinking chlorinated water and the other, the Jacuzzi, would be the “hot” spring.

I could hear the call of the birds but I couldn’t see them from the tops of their canopy. I felt like I was being stalked and I probably was...fucking cats.
I was inspecting the site where the fresh water pool was to be installed when my foot was tangled in a thick vine. I tried to yank free but I fell as I was lying there trying to catch my breath, I felt the ground beneath me shift. I tried to get up but before I could I fell again, this time 30 feet beneath the foundation of my home.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious; when I woke up I realized that my left leg, right wrist, my jaw and maybe a rib or two had been broken. As I lay looking up at the shaft of light, jagged floor boards and pebbles of dirt that slid down the hole I left I did the best I could to stay calm and breath.

The worst-case scenario would be that I would spend the night here and would be found by the grounds keeper when his did his morning rounds. I drifted in and out of sleep, when I woke up again it was still daylight. My jaw didn’t hurt as bad and neither did my ribs. I was able to drag my self up to a sitting position and get a better look at the cavernous void that I had fallen into.

If I had of landed just a foot to the left I would have kept falling. I gingerly peeked over the cliff that I was perched on and saw nothing but blackness, it was cool and I could hear water.

There was a wall thrusting itself upward from the abyss and the pillars that crowned it stopped just a few feet from the foundation of my home. The temple wall was constructed of large stones that had been cut and placed on top of each other and I could see images carved within the wall.

As I studied the strange symbols that had been chiseled in the rock I wondered what message the ancient people who worshiped here were trying to convey when I saw an image that made my blood freeze in my veins.

Shaped within this stone that had been underground for God only knows how long we’re the faces of my children. I cried out and closed my eyes, opening them slowly to see if what I saw would still be there. It was. My two children, I saw the light from above flicker. I looked up and saw a silhouette of a head, and then another, and another.