The Tower

The Tower

He woke up squinting as the glare of the morning sun shined into his eyes. He sat up in his bed, feeling content because today would be the day he finally finished the tower he had worked on for so long. He slipped on his socks, his toes poking through the worn down wool and hurried to his kitchen for breakfast.

A day as special as this one called for his old wedding china that had been sitting in the back cabinet ever since he moved in . There were still cobwebs on the plate, but he hadn’t cared much for hygiene in a while. The rock hard biscuit he ate that morning must have been around two weeks old, but he didn’t care much for food anymore either.

After breakfast he got ready for work on the tower. He left his small house, leaving the door unlocked, and made his way to the tower carrying a large leather bag. In that bag was a pickaxe and more importantly, a picture of his wife that had resided at his bedside so long that he had to gently blow the dust off of it before he had put it in the bag. Normally he would never bring something so valuable to work, but today was a special day.

Along the way, he passed a few people from town but didn’t bother to say hello as he usually did.

Once he had been walking for about a mile, a tall structure appeared over the horizon and he smiled. It was the tower. It rose high into the sky, with its top just barely touching the clouds. He was very proud of his work; it had taken him a very long time to perfect the tower. He had tried to build two other towers before this one, but both had failed. He had not used flat enough blocks in the first tower and it had become unbalanced and fell. His second attempt, he had used flat enough blocks, but he had not built it behind the mountain, so the wind knocked it over. But the third tower was perfectly balanced and was blocked from the wind by the colossal mountain in front of it. He stared at the tower as he walked, admiring his work.

Soon he came upon a large hole in the ground, his quarry. He stopped and pulled the pick axe and picture of his wife from the bag. He placed the picture softly on the ground and brought the bag and pickaxe with him into the quarry. He found a smooth spot along the wall and started swinging the pickaxe.

He had become a master at cutting blocks, and it only took him about half an hour to cut out a perfect two by two foot block of stone. He used the long edge of the pick axe to flatten out each side of the block. Then, he cut a shallow line across one side that could be used as a handhold for climbing. He shoved the rock in the bag and left the quarry, leaving his pickaxe in the hole. He carefully placed the picture on top of the rock in the bag, lifted the straps over his shoulders, and started walking towards the base of the tower. The rock was heavy, but his shoulders had grown very strong and he barely felt the bag as he walked.

When he got to the base of the tower he stopped and took the picture out of the bag again. He looked closely at it, examining his wife’s face. He still remembered the last time they were together before the accident.

They had been laying in the park all day, doing nothing but talking and looking at the clouds. As he laid next to her he turned and asked what she would do if she had the power to do anything in the world at that moment. She answered, “I would like to sleep on a cloud. Can you imagine how peaceful that would be?”

He didn’t know how long ago that was, but the memory had become increasingly blurry and that scared him. He put the picture back into the bag and started to climb the tower.

Climbing had once been very difficult for him, but he had a newfound strength for today. Finally, he reached the top. He stopped and looked around as he caught his breath. The top of his head was only a few inches below the clouds, and he could see for miles around. Once his breathing returned to normal he took the picture out of the bag again. Then he thrust the bag over his shoulders in one fluid motion so that the rock in the bag now laid at the top of the tower. He slid the bag off the rock and dropped it, watching it fall towards the ground. Then he looked up at the cloud, inhaled deeply, and climbed the last few feet of the tower.

He looked around at a view of purely white. His entire upper body was above the clouds now and he felt like he was waist deep in heaven. He brought the picture of his wife up to eye level and a single tear rolled down his cheek as he remembered her. He kissed the picture and then closed his eyes. He fell back onto the cloud as if it were a bed.

The next time he opened his eyes he was on the cloud next to his wife. “You were right,” he told her, “this is peaceful.”