Weekly Writing – January 7 2023

“Just one more job,” they mocked, following after him as he tried to stalk away across the tarry black. “How stupid could you be? Since when is there just one more job and then everything will be roses and champagne? Since-”
“You went along with it,” he snapped back over his shoulder. Couldn’t tell what, exactly, he was walking on. Gritty, gravelly, a place where nothing grew. Couldn’t say how they had gotten there. “Could practically see the gold coins gleaming in your eyes when I-”
“I didn’t expect it to be just one more job and then glorious retirement,” they said. “But I didn’t think you’d fuck up so badly that it would be one more job and then whatever this is instead. Where the hell are we?”
“How should I know?” When he couldn’t even say how they had gotten there? He’d just opened the little black box. Jewellery box carved in stern onyx, and then vertigo had seemed to tip him forward from the edge of a pit, his heart had hit his spine, and the next thing he’d known, he’d been lying in those black wastes with them beside him.
Closer than they’d lain in months. How had it all gone so wrong?
“I can’t believe you thought anything better than this was going to come of stealing from a wizard. Even if we had gotten out with the goods, what are the chances they wouldn’t have been cursed? That box probably was. We could be dead already.”
“If so, this must be hell, since they left me with you,” he snapped again, was just about ready to snap completely, staring at that horizon that never seemed to end or even really start. Just darkness chipped into black stone, as far as he could see. As far as they could both walk, maybe. “Look, if you have a better idea, I’d be happy to hear it. But all I can think of now is to try to find a way out.”
“It was trying to find a way out that got us into this mess,” they muttered. But they kept following behind him, and he hoped, all he could hope was that he was leading them somewhere worthwhile this time, wandering through what could have been death or just the inside of the wizard’s black box.