The Well

Tommy Lauren lived at the bottom of a well. He was never looking out at the world but looking up. His neck had hundreds of tiny wrinkles and creases from looking up. No one ever walked by his well. He hadn’t seen a single person since the day he found himself in the well. It had been a strange day when he woke up at the bottom of the well. Tommy had been the kind of person who would look at the world every morning with his cup of coffee. He was the kind of person who would daily find some unfortunate person and say to himself, “Thank God I am not he.”1

Now Tommy was one of those unfortunate people. He survived on grass that grew on the sides of the well and on the chest-deep water he had found himself in. When he had woken up, he had been proper up against one end of the well. It wasn’t a very wide well but it was very high up, which eliminated any possibility of climbing out. And the fact that no one walked by was even worse.2

Tommy occasionally saw a dog or cat or sometimes a chipmunk or two scurry past the well. Sometimes he prayed a reasonably sized animal would fall in for him to kill and eat, but then he didn’t know how he would kill it. He supposed he might take the animal and throw it against the well walls so that it was dashed to death, but then he thought it would contaminate his water. Tommy figured he preferred having to survive on grass and clean groundwater to dying from contaminated water. He didn’t want cat blood in his water. Or squirrel or dog blood for that matter. And what if the dog had rabies? Surely Tommy would die foaming at the mouth. And having muscle spasms. And then on top of it all, he would probably drown. No, Tommy Lauren preferred eating grass and drinking water. He pretended the grass was salad and that he was just deprived of proper dressing. He imagined he had raspberry vinaigrette to top off his delicious salad. He thought of tomatoes and cucumbers gracing the salad, and sliced carrots fringing it, and Italian dressing sprinkled on top of the graciously slathered raspberry.3

Tommy scraped some grass off of the well wall with one grubby fingernail and popped it into his mouth, grateful for some nourishment. He was thankful he had something to eat; what if he had been stuck in the well without anything at all? What if the well had been empty? Dying of starvation was sure to be unpleasant.  Starvation meant a slow death. Tommy didn’t like the idea of a slow death.4

Tommy thought a lot about death lately. He decided that if he had to die, he might as well die in his sleep, without knowing it, or have someone chop his head off or something: something nice and easy, quick and painless. He preferred a death that involved little or no pain. He did not want to go to heaven (he was sure he was going to heaven) with his last thoughts of Earth being that it was a very painful place. He had had a pretty nice life on Earth and he wanted it to be a stainless memory. Pain would scar it and mar it and kill it. Tommy had experienced little or no pain in his life and he wanted his death to be the same way.5

Tommy looked up, using the creases in his neck, as the rain began to fall. It had never rained before in the well. Tommy wondered if the well was going to fill up when he was asleep and bury him underwater. He wondered if being buried alive by water was anything close to being buried alive in earth. He wouldn’t know that, of course, but it was a thought. He figured that being buried alive by water was bound to be more comfortable, and he probably would either drown in a few minutes, or he would wake up and swim to the top. Maybe if the water rose up high enough and pushed him up high enough and if he swam up high enough, Tommy could fly up, up, up, and out! of the water. Tommy wondered if he was part of a disease. He thought this must all be one grand disease and either he was getting sick or he was the cure. The cure! It sounded wonderful to him. He wanted to be the cure to something. He wanted to do something with his life. He didn’t want to die alone in this well. He began to cry.6

An hour later it had rained enough for Tommy to swim up to the top. Delirious with joy, he waved his arms frantically about, swimming, propelling, flying. He jumped out of the well and yelled, “I’m free!”7

He ran up to his house. His mother hugged him. “Where have you been, Tommy?”8

“Oh, I was just playing in the garbage can, Mommy. It was a well! And when it filled up with rain, I was high enough to fly out of it!”9

“But baby, people can’t fly, baby.”10

“I flied, Mommy! I flied!11

Honey Lauren laughed her honey laugh. “You flied? Well come inside and dry off and then tell me all about it.”12

She wrapped her four-year-old in her arms and walked slowly back inside, relishing the rain. She wanted to fly out of a garbage can.13