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    Extra Life
    Extra Life
    Extra Life
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Extra Life

    By G. Wilson Poole

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Courageous warriors, long lost lovers, diligent builders, studious priests, and legendary musicians: everyone must cross the abyss between life and death. Extra Life is a series of short stories exploring the mysteries of death and reincarnation through each of the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherG. Wilson Poole
    Release dateFeb 5, 2018
    ISBN9781386509585
    Extra Life

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      Book preview

      Extra Life - G. Wilson Poole

      Today is the day. My destiny has been incubating for a very long time, but at last, it is here. My application has been submitted and approved, my bags are packed, and I've said my goodbyes to the few people I will actually miss when I leave this place. Last night, my parents took me out to eat in the fanciest restaurant in town. I was concerned that I would be too excited to taste the food, but once I actually sat down to eat, the opposite was true. Feeling the momentum of destiny behind me, I was unusually calm, almost zen, savoring every bite. Although I did sculpt a little fortress out of my potatoes au gratin before eating them, which caused my parents a small amount of embarrassment. But they were too happy, too proud of me to really care. Given the circumstances, they could easily forgive the fact that their adult offspring was playing with food in public.

      ––––––––

      My mother and father tell me that I was playing with modeling clay before I could walk, sculpting little houses and bridges and pyramids, sometimes creating entire little villages. They thought for sure I would grow up to be an architect and told me so. But it seemed odd to me, because I was clearly already an architect. By the time I was five years old, my little clay experiments had become load-bearing structures. By the time I was eight, I had moved on to wood-working in my father's shed, a skill I quickly put to use making various home improvements. My parents were deeply skeptical at first, and demanded I stop, but I continued my work every time they turned their backs, until they were reaping the benefits of my efforts and forced to accept my talent.

      I started by fixing the hinges of the doors and the handles of the cupboards. Then I gave every leaky faucet and rattling window a tune-up. Making the most of the power sander and table saw in my father's shed, I added a rounded baseboard molding to each room in our fixer-upper home, and replaced a broken toilet seat with a smooth wooden one of my own design. I revamped the banister of both staircases, and built a patio table from scratch. For Christmas that year, I asked for a jigsaw and cried when I was given a puzzle instead. My father, astonished at his obvious mistake, slapped his forehead and made the exchange as soon as the stores were open. I rewarded him by carving an ornate headboard for my parents' king-size bed and an elaborate wooden archway for the backyard. My mother joked that it was too big and too beautiful for her humble little garden, but I could tell she was pleased.

      ––––––––

      One evening, I felt compelled to take a break from my creative hobbies and my habitual introversion, and joined my parents watching TV after dinner. We all sat together on the couch, and my parents decided, since it was so out of character for me to relax with the family, that I should choose the channel. They handed me the remote, and I channel surfed until coming across a documentary on the Temple of Tall Cove. The construction of the Temple, according to the documentary narrator with the comforting voice, began almost fifteen hundred years ago. Its foundations were laid on the beach, against the walls of the steep cliff that gave Tall Cove its name, by a nomadic architect from a far off land. This nameless architect was believed by historians to have been a member of a secretive cult of mathematicians who had been persecuted and driven into hiding by a newly risen emperor fearful of any challenge to his absolute authority. His teachers executed and his community scattered, the architect wandered aimlessly across land and sea until stumbling into Tall Cove and beginning his life's greatest work.

      The architect took no wife and started no family. He worked as a carpenter and a mason for the nearby villages, but poured all of his extra time into the construction of the Temple. It was a monument to geometric perfection, a solid embodiment of the golden ratio expressed a thousand different ways. As the architect's efforts progressed, he realized he could go no further on his own. He turned to local laborers, many of whom knew him and respected his work, and hired them to erect the stone pillars and archways he'd designed. Those laborers, astonished at the twin spiral staircases encircling the pyramid and the helical symmetry of the Temple grounds, took their stories of Tall Cove back to their families, who in turn spread the tales to merchants and travelers. Before long, princes and wayfarers of all kinds were journeying to witness the architect at work. Of course, it was only a matter of time before another insecure emperor took umbrage at the Temple, and ordered it to be destroyed, along with its architect. The countryside wept, but none could stop the emperor and his soldiers. The architect was torn to pieces in the public square, and the Temple of Tall Cove was left in ruins.

      But almost a century later, the people of the nearby villages spied a young man roaming around the demolished Temple. The young man pulled the weeds that had sprung up on the Temple grounds, and scrubbed the moss from the fallen columns and pyramid walls. The central pyramid, as it happened, was so well built that the (now former) emperor's men had been unable to topple it to the ground. The young interloper went about repairing the damage, painting over scorch marks and filling in the chips and cracks in the pyramid's faces. He cleared a winding path to the Temple's entrance, and paved it with alabaster brick. The more astute of the locals gathered atop Tall Cove noticed that, from their elevated vantage point, the curving brick pathway exhibited the same intrinsic beauty and mathematical perfection characteristic of the original architect's work. Anticipating what was to come, the village elders sent a few teams of men to help the new arrival. They were immediately put to work lifting the fallen columns to their former positions. While they worked, the newcomer set about repairing the broken spiral staircases that had once encircled the pyramid, throwing aside stones that had been shattered with hammers and axes and replacing them with new ones. In a few short weeks, the Temple was restored to its former glory. But the newcomer was not finished. Without so much as a break, he began sculpting a series of great stone eagles. The larger ones, standing tall and proud, lined the pathway and the staircases, while the smaller ones, wings spread in flight, were placed atop the Temple's many doorways. The newcomer took care to etch every individual feather into each wing and each breast. The construction of the eagles consumed the rest of the man's short life. Almost as soon as the last sculpture was completed, the new builder took ill from his relentless over-exertion, and died shortly thereafter.

      About a hundred years later, a young woman arrived in Tall Cove and set up shop creating ceramic pots. Some she sold in order to feed herself, but most of them she took to the Temple, lining the walkways with the larger pots, and hanging the smaller ones from balconies and archways. She filled the pots with soil, and, come spring, dozens of fruits, ferns, and flowers burst forth. The potter stayed in Tall Cove for many years, selling her wares and maintaining the garden at the Temple. Eventually she became old and sick, and though she had no sons or daughters of her own, she passed on the job of garden upkeep to a number of local children, who not only tended the plants for many years, but swept the stairs and walkways, and scrubbed bird excrement off the statues and Temple walls, and did everything in their power to keep the Temple clean and beautiful.

      These groundskeepers passed the job onto their children, who passed the job onto their children, and so on. But they did not do so selflessly. The Temple of Tall Cove had become something of a tourist attraction, and brought a regular stream of merchants and nobles into the small nearby villages. Keeping the empty Temple beautiful guaranteed the attention of all the world's travelers, and guaranteed the spending of those travelers' coins. Those nearby villages gradually became more and more prosperous as the years and the decades passed, and each generation born there found themselves better off than the previous one. With more wealth came more leisure time, and from this leisure time emerged a cadre of philosophers. They pondered the legends of the Temple that had been passed down from their parents and grandparents, and did their best to fill in the gaps where those legends failed to inform. Going further, they theorized at length about the secret origins of the Temple, and debated why it had even been constructed in the first place.

      Before long, these informal gatherings of curious philosophers had metamorphosized and diverged into two rival schools of mathematical occultism. To the other villagers, it was all a bunch of irritating foolishness. After all, only the members of these two cults could distinguish one's belief system from the other. The groundskeepers wanted nothing to do with it, and, on far too many mornings, cleaned arcane sigils and candle wax from the floors of the Temple's

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