For those who read this blog, you generally find material of a more serious nature. However, I felt it was time to add something a little different into the mix. I have an idea for a short story and thought it might be fun to see where it goes without edits or rewrites. Consider it like a tv sit-com recorded in front of a live audience. I encourage comments and hope we can have a fun little journey together.
C.L. Harmon
He was born Malachi Martín Musgrave, a fitting name it seems for someone such as this peculiar creation. Born in 1975 in a small town in Oklahoma, he would quickly become an oddity of sorts to many once he began junior high. Although his parents already had their suspicions that he seemed to have a part of his brain switched on that the rest didn’t, they hoped for him a normal life.
But there was something very different about Malachi; something that no one else in the world possessed. It was something that would take him all over the world and into an incredibly abnormal life. He had a gift which seemed to jump out of the Old Testament from the days of prophets and into the present and into a relatively no one. Strangely though, other than this extraordinary gift. Malachi was normal. In fact so normal, he was boring. He was a mediocre student, awkward around girls, was into the new arcade game craze and had wet dreams like all pubescent boys who fantasized about what breasts feel like and if sex was really heaven on earth as he had heard from older kids and his brother Caleb.
Malachi had a love of history. All the other subjects were simply a waste of time after the seventh grade he believed. But history had a fascination about. It held a connection to him that felt as real to him as any connection he had with family and friends. An eighth-grade history class incident would help him to begin understanding why. One day while flipping through the textbook to the subject matter of that day, he came across a photo of a tablet with cuneiform writing. The symbols on that tablet made sense to him. It was as though he was reading the English alphabet. It made perfect sense to him. He then read the caption below the photo and realized that it explained what he had just read on the tablet.
Immediately, he walked to the teacher’s desk to ask about it but was told to return to his seat and get on board with what the class was learning that day. Try as he may to listen to the teacher, his thoughts were a flurry of possible explanations as to how he could read the tablet. Pac-Man scores and even the thoughts of naked teenage girls would soon come to be taken over by afternoon sessions in the school library and eventually the town library. A slight obsession his parents thought, one that would subside with the excitement of high school, driving, and dating. They were wrong.
By the time he had started his sophomore year, the local library had borrowed hundreds of books from other libraries for him. He had even taught himself to write cuneiform so he would have copies of what he had been reading. However, he had kept his gift a secret from everyone. He told his parents that he had a love of history and that he was curious about learning all he could about it. He knew that what he could do was strange, but had no idea as to how extraordinary a gift it actually was or how beneficial it would someday be. His father, not the bookworm type, worried about his son who seemed to have no interest in girls, cars or sports. He did have friends that he spent time with, but only if there was not a new book at the library.
His fascination with what he was learning was like an addicting drug. The more he read, the more he wanted to learn. Every shard of clay was a puzzle piece that became part of an ever increasing and intriguing picture. Most of it made no sense. It was a book with many of its pages torn out. But there was definitely a story there he believed. It was more of a feeling than anything else. Archaic communications that held no meaning or purpose in the present is really what they seemed to be. They should be nothing more than pieces of a collection in the world’s museums. But what if they were more, Malachi wondered as he began seeing glimpses into the world of 5,000 years ago. But then again, maybe those thoughts were nothing more than the desired fantasy of a boy who dreamt of a life filled with adventure instead of one with old books, joysticks and the curiosity of hormone-raged teen. Reality it seems is never far behind one’s fantasies.
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