Writing journal

You are out walking through an isolated field and you stumble upon a small flag poking out of the ground. You walk over to the flag and decide to start digging. You can’t believe what you find.

I've been here before. Well, not in this barren field, this is new. But I've been sad before. Tired. Lonely. I know this feeling, I know it will pass. Walking has always helped me clear my head. And so I walk

I try to think of nothing. I look around. There's a pile of sugar beets on my left, covered in a plastic sheet to protect them from the rain. There are clouds above, a light, shapeless grey from horizon to horizon. Pebbles beneath my shoes. A muddy patch. A flag.

I take a second look.

Yes, there's a small flag poking out of this field, about three inches tall. I kneel to pick it up, curious. It resists my pull. As I look at it, I notice that under the mud, the flag is not plain, but coloured in three horizontal stripes: purple, orange and yellow.

On a different day, I may have shrugged and walked away. Today, any distraction is welcome. I decide to take this little flag home with me and look up what it may signify. Perhaps a training flag for sailors? Maybe part of a doll set, or a miniature.

I scratch the soil with a couple of fingers. The stick is planted solidly in the ground, it goes deeper than I expected. I start grabbing handfuls of dirt, I pull some grassroots that surround the polished metal of its stick. Then, my fingertips find something hard, perhaps the base of this little flag. As I dig and dig I find that's actually an oblong metal box, five inches wide and twice as long. “A time capsule!” I think immediately.

I pull it out of the soil and wipe it with the palm of my hand, excited. Only then I notice the strange blades of metal on its side, shaped like mouldboards on a plough.

For a moment, I panic. What if it's an unexploded bomb? There's plenty in these fields, form one of the many wars fought during the last century. I stand there, frozen, holding the object in my hands, too scared to put it down.

For a moment, I consider throwing it as far as possible, but I'm not particularly athletic and the explosion would probably reach me anyway. What if I gently put it back and run? Or would tippy-toeing away be smarter?

As I ponder, I hear a clang coming from inside the object.

“This is how it ends,” I think, a bead of sweat running down my back.

I wait for the explosion, but nothing happens. Another sound. A creaky little noise like old furniture. The small flag starts to spin slowly with a sound scraping metal and what seems like a faint panting.

I'm too surprised to move. I watch the tip of the bomb unscrew itself and I swear I can hear a faint muttering, but maybe it's just the wind. The hollow piece of metal falls at my feet with a muffled thud and I instinctively jump back, letting out an embarrassingly high-pitched scream.

“Whoa whoa whoa hold still for the love of God!”

I look around, startled by the voice.

“Who's there?” I yell to the wind. Maybe I'm losing my mind. There's no one around me.

“I'm here!” I look right in front of me and I see her. She's holding on for dear life to the edge of the metal box I'm holding. I immediately flip the object in a vertical position and she finds ground under her feet.

“Phew,” she exhales. She stretches her fingers, then pulls her goggles from her eyes to her forehead and looks up at me. I stare at the small, perfectly formed human in fingerless gloves and some type of uniform that's standing in the can-shaped object I'm now holding. She seems as flabbergasted as I am.

Her eyes dart left to right, I can see her breaths getting shallow. She's scared.

“No no no don't be scared. It's all good, I won't hurt you.”

There's a long silence.

“Can you put me down then?” She says hesitantly.

I gently place the mysterious object on the ground. I want to grab her and help her out of it, but I feel like it would be rude. She quickly throws a ladder out of one side, though, so I don't need to worry about it.

She climbs down and reaches the ground, then drops on her knees and starts crying.

“Hey, hey, what's happening?” I lower myself to her eye level, practically crawling on the muddy ground. “It's all good, you're safe.”

She takes a few minutes to calm down, then rolls to a seating position, back against what I now understand is a small vehicle.

“I'm sorry, I thought... I thought I'd die in there. I've been stuck in my digger for three days, I was running out of food... I had lost hope.”

I blink, still trying to adjust to the fact that a tiny woman is talking to me.

“Thank you!” she says as if she's just realised she's supposed to, “You saved my life.”

“How did you end up in there?”

She takes a long breath.

“My people have lived underground for a very long time, but our ceiling is slowly crumbling down, burying parts of our city. My family had to leave their house, and many others with them. We can't move the soil fast enough, and soon, there will be no space to put it. So I built this digger from a metal box that fell through during a landslide...”

I pick the digger and see it is, in fact, a modified bomb casing.

“It must have come from somewhere, right? Somewhere outside. So I set myself to find a way out. But five days in, my digger got stuck...”

“You hit some roots, your vehicle got tangled...” I explain.

“But then you came.”

She gives me a small smile and wiped a tear with the back of her hand.

“No problem,” is all I can say. It truly was no trouble, apart from some dirty fingernails and a small death scare.

“They said it was hopeless, but here I am!” She says with a chuckle. “Just needed a little help.”

“But you didn't know someone would be there to help you.” It slips out of me, I realise one second too late how indelicate I've been.

“But you were there. You saw my flag.”

She's gotten a little cocky now, which I suspect is her natural disposition.

“I did.”

“See? If you don't ask for help, no one's going to come. But if you do, there's some hope.”

I'm still on all four, which is a pretty stupid position to be in to be delivered a universal truth. So I sit and rest my weight on my heels. I too have been in a hopeless hole for a while now.

Maybe it's time I put my flag out.