Morgana

Freeze Fork Miner

Morgana had just unearthed the final damning piece of evidence, proving the cave-in that sealed her husband and thirty other miners miles beneath the earth’s crust, was caused by blatant negligence on the part of the mine owners- when they came for her.

Though the incident itself had taken place months ago, the financial and emotional repercussions within their small mining community continued to claim casualties, as two devastated widows faced with no imaginable way to provide for their hungry children, chose death rather than face being tossed out of their homes by the mines greedy overseers, anxious to fill the numerous vacancies in personnel that were causing production to lag.

Rather than just accept these great injustices as the hand of fate, Morgana, one of the only book schooled widows, took the pittance offered her by the mine owners in exchange for her husband’s life, boarded a bus to Charleston and enlisted the researching prowess of a starving young college student.

Together they unearthed decades of penny pinching neglect ranging from the purchasing of inferior safety equipment from overseas, to a list of names of convicted safety inspectors, all of whom the courts had proven were only too happy to look the other way, when it put a few extra dollars in their pockets.

She had just completed a meeting with the one crooked inspector that held the key, the very man that had informed the mine owners only weeks before the cave-in, that imminent collapse of the ancient timbers fortifying the walls along that vein of the mine, was no longer a speculative question of ‘if’, but rather a resounding chorus, of ‘when’- before signing off in the affirmative in exchange for what could now be referred to as blood money.

If they thought the bullet that pierced her heart would silence her, it was only because they underestimated the amount of data that could be absorbed by a dirt poor miners wife- as Morgana had swallowed the USB drive containing all the evidence necessary to, not only win her case, but ensure even in death, (if it should come to that) the earthly vessel she left behind could be relied upon to provide the courts with the documentation they would need to convict the mine owners, and thus insure an atrocity such as this would not happen again.

Written for Girlie on the Edge’s Six Sentence Story cue word: Vessel

21 thoughts on “Morgana”

  6. Evident in the preceding comments is the aspect of writing I enjoy the most, i.e. discovering and coming to know characters, (and) stumbling upon the perfect image/photos… amazing process, this writing, non?
    Nice twist on the ending.

    It never fails to blow me away, the range and variety of the realities out there/back then….(like the guy in the photo at the top of the post… dead by now, sure… but he was a real person, alive (at the time)… lives branching out from the day pictured like endless rivers.)

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