down in the quarry there is no noise

(place) by junkpile Tue Jul 04 2000 at 3:53:23
If you go to the quarry before the men get there, the machines stand around like dead dinosaurs, and there is no noise but the noise you make. I tried to keep mine to footsteps but found myself humming Scarborough Fair. I hummed it once and stopped; I was done, and the sound of slow crunching footsteps was better. I walked with my head down, looking for things the machines had unearthed and left behind. I found purple quartz, I found deer tracks and a deer vertebra, I found thin-split layers of limestone with shadows in them that sometimes resolved themselves into a curled fern, or the whorl of a shell, or little tiny bones, frozen flat like a xerox. The dirt on the ground was good. Mostly beige dust, when rubbed between the fingers it hurt, because of all the sharp little things in it, pieces of rock and bone, pieces of things that used to be here, whole, things that were almost but not quite done telling their stories.
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