Filling the Silo, Part One

Here you have a piece of my lousy fiction.  Be kind, this is a big step for me.

I used to wake up each morning all on my own, I'd just pop right out of bed at the precise moment I needed to pop out of bed with no prompting from an outside force.  My body knew the exact timing on everything.

There was certainly a routine, be sure, but none to speak of.  I did what I did when my body popped out of bed and then I went to my job.

Said job consisted of picking up golf-ball sized rocks from a giant pile full of such rocks, all very similar in appearance, all very grey, and putting them, one by one, into a funnel-type thing on the floor next to the pile.  They'd fall into the middle and drop down to wherever it is that they dropped, for whatever purpose. 

The rocks were always piled high when I got to work, the pile never gone when I left.

I had been doing this for quite some time and there were two things that kept me going. 

One.

Spending the day thinking of the infinite ways I could get the entire pile of rocks down the funnel before my shift ended so I could see, with my very own eyes, how the pile would be replenished.  Or, maybe it wouldn't.  Maybe I would get far enough down the pile that the rocks wouldn't go down the funnel anymore and they'd stop because what I imagined to be a silo beneath the funnel would fill up for once.  I suppose reason one could be seen as a two-parter: either I'd run out of rocks or the silo would fill.  Either/or.  If one of these two things happened, I was sure things were going to change for me in an unimaginable way.  Don't ask what things.  I didn't have it figured out yet.

Two.

How to describe it?  Think of a wide rubber band, the kind that's so wide, you can't stretch it as far as other, more normal rubber bands.  We'll call this my "band of determination."  I had a band of determination to infect others with my spirit.  In my job, two people worked in each room on their pile of rocks.  It was really loud in the room, like in any other factory, I suppose (not that I'd ever been in any other factory); yet, there were only two people, a pile of rocks, and the funnel.  To be quite clear and honest, I don't know how many other rooms there were or what the people in them were doing.  I imagine the same thing as I was only I'd never seen them so we're working off a picture I've created with my rather limited imagination.  Like I said, I've been at this awhile and I've worked with nearly a dozen different people in my room.  Not at the same time, of course, since there are only two per room (I imagine).  It seems that my job has high turnover.  Everyone I work with always starts off with a level of dissatisfaction that's probably normal for most but grows exponentially with each passing day until, eventually, I come in to a brand spankin' new coworker.  So, number two is to stretch my band of determination farther than before to infect each new coworker with my spirit until they're perfectly satisfied, like me.

The idea being that if either part of number one or all of number two occurs, things will change.

*if I am very brave, I will post part two