Bottom of the Well

It did not matter how I fell to the bottom of the well, what mattered was how I was to survive the ensuing days until I would hopefully be rescued. I had sent a carrier pigeon to the last of my remaining relatives, and I knew that I could trust the carrier pigeon. He had been a bosom buddy of mine for many reliable years. He knew my relatives well. But we were both aware of the fact that they lived many miles away – that it might take days for them to receive the message. Who knows how long it would take for them to actually act and come to my aid. 

I had three books with me, down there at the bottom of the well. I had not intended on being stuck with these three books for days on end. As a matter of fact, I was on my way to the library to return these three books when I fell down the well. I had two of the books under my arm, and I was leafing through the third book to make sure I hadn’t accidentally underlined or highlighted any passages. I made it a habit of underlining passages – highlighting and writing notes on the pages of the books I owned and housed in my personal library. This was well and good, but it made it a problem when I was reading a book I had checked out from the library. When I connected with a passage – when I found it especially intriguing or noticed that there was a greater message and connections to be had – I felt compelled to make notes and highlights on the page. It felt like my duty as a reader and observer of life. But I had become so accustomed to making these notes and highlights that I had unfortunately had “reading accidents” – moments when I would put a pen or highlighter to a borrowed book from the library. “My god!” I remember thinking when I scrawled a note in the corner of a page. “I have defaced public property. I am going to prison for sure!” While I knew that my intentions were good and I was just in the throes of connecting with the literature I was reading, I was reminded of the reason people buy and don’t rent. If you want to connect with the literature in more visceral ways and make it your own, make it your dear friend for life, you buy a book. If you want to admire and appreciate from afar, you check out the book from the library. 

I was thumbing through the pages of the third rented book in front of me, ensuring that I had not accidentally made any notes or highlights, when I tripped on the stones and, instead of tripping over them and gaining my balance on the ground, fell directly into the well and somehow seriously injured myself instead of meeting my untimely death. For you see, the well was incredibly deep into the ground. I don’t know much about how wells work, but it was a damn long and deep well. 

“Well, well, well,” I thought to myself as I came to, feeling the sharp pain in my sides and the slight gash on the side of my forehead. “Look what we have here.” 

A second thought I had was, “How am I not dead?” I looked at everything beneath me, and there was a gathering of wood chips that were gathered at the bottom of the well. “What are wood chips doing at the bottom of a well?” I wondered to myself. But I couldn’t complain too much, for they were what helped break my fall and ensured that I didn’t die. “Thanks, wood chips,” I thought to myself. 

I could feel a sharp pain in my side, and it felt instinctively like I had broken at least one rib. It was a bit harder to breathe, but I discovered that if I held a hand over the side that was giving me pain, I could breathe easier and more fully. So I kept one hand on my side, and used the other hand to flip open a book. 

I spent time leafing through the first of the three borrowed books. It was difficult to flip pages by holding the book with just one hand, but when I tried removing the other hand from my side, I discovered it was far too painful and immediately placed that hand back on my side. I managed to find a way of placing a finger on the next page whenever I needed to flip, and I kept it there when I closed the book with my one hand and then opened it up again. And so I found a way to reread the book, the novel about heresy and witchcraft that I had found to be somewhat dull and cliche, but was also the most preferable book to reread out of the three. 

I was ten pages into the novel when the carrier pigeon arrived to meet me at the bottom of the well. I knew he would come. I knew that there was a reason to become friends – not only friends, but bosom buddies – with a carrier pigeon. Not only was he a wonderful companion, but at this moment he had become a lifesaver in my time of need. 

It was as if I was wearing a tracking device. He drifted down to my level at the bottom of the well and rested on the arm that was held against my side. He nestled his head against his wing, and then he stretched out a wing and brushed it against the side of my face. Almost as if to say, “there there friend – I see your pain, and I am honestly sorry about it.” I ripped off half the page I was on – page 17- and I ripped it again with finesse, so that only three sentences or so were on that part of the page. It took more finesse – using the crook of an elbow and my teeth – to rip that part of the page into a chosen phrase that I wished to send with my bosom buddy. The phrase on the page was “and of course he needed help in this endeavor”, and I closed the book and had the scrap of the page in my open palm. The carrier pigeon took the hint and snatched it out of my hand. 

“Don’t eat it,” I told him. 

I could still see a sliver of the scrap in his beak. I knew he wouldn’t eat it. We had come too far together, the two of us. 

He took off as soon as I looked him in the eye. Spiraling up and up and up. 

I opened up the novel about the heresy and witches again, continuing to keep one hand on my side and one hand on the book. I would just have to deal with the library charges.