What The Men Saw: a short story

By Matthew Balleza

A telephone repairman stirs a nightmare at the bottom of a manhole.

 

from What The Men Saw: 

 

"All day for work Donny trundled down the streets in one of the white telephone trucks with a hydraulic crane and basket in the back that could extend and reach powerlines. Every day he and his men received a list of repairs to attend to - routine maintenance at stop lights, drooping cables, and fiber optic inspections down manholes.

 

He could not count how many holes he had been down in his day; how many 200 lb covers, each as heavy as a millstone he had lifted off and leaned against the yellow protection cage they raised at every site. How many rats had he seen running below in sewage containments, some the size of cats, or how many syringes had he found dropped to the bottom. He had seen it all."

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Balleza
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215156322

Book preview

Matthew Balleza

What The Men Saw: a short story

Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Balleza

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Chapter 1

Donny Capretti was a technician employed by a telephone company in Boston to repair dead connections across town. His job was climbing poles and untangling utility lines, severing tree limbs that fell across wires, and crawling down manholes and laying cables beneath the city. It was good, decent work, and he had been at it for twenty years, since the time he graduated from Salem State and came home to take care of his mother when his father died.

Now he was 42 years old, a worn, unmarried, overworked man, past the prime of his days. He had wrestled in college, and there remained in his face a remnant of the toughness he had on the mat, but it was blunted, washed-up. He lived with his Polish god-fearing mother in the town of Medford, in the same house they moved to when he was 12 years old. It was a cluttered, green, two storey house with peeling paint around the outside and a flight of concrete stairs in front that led up to a small, wrap around porch with folding chairs on it. Inside smelled of lemon oil and wood polish. His mother kept the curtains closed to preserve her good furniture from sun damage, and to keep outside eyes from looking in. Cleanliness and dimness dominated her keeping of the house, and Donny knew they played part of the long somberness of her widowhood, which he did not begrudge her, but accepted under her roof. The room Donny inherited when he returned had the same floral wallpaper and pea green carpet it had when it was a guest room so many years ago.