Construction Site

by David Thornbrugh

If you dig deep enough, everyone knows, you come out in a Chinese restaurant. Every day the hole is a little deeper. The workers shrink until they are termites deep in Australian earth raising mounds far larger than their makers. The soil is gray and ashen, spit out from a dozen surrounding volcanoes that currently sleep. A nap of ten thousand years is nothing to a mountain. Boulders emerge like random thoughts and pop up moving belts that all day move dirt dug out to waiting trucks to carry off. The biggest problem of any civilization is disposal. We make mountains out of foundations dug so deep you need an elevator to go to hell, it's the same problem Nimrod faced building the tower we call Babel. But that's just a fable, we're much more able than any bunch of builders who've ever built before.