Free The Journey Prize Stories 28 by Kate Cayley

the gate. There’s sniggering in the dark cage behind him. “You need some help with that? Too much heavy lifting today?”
    When she flips the locks and opens the lid, she sees nothing at first, but then she lifts the paper towel she wraps her apples in and sees two little black holes like tooth punctures in the centre of the greasy steel underneath. The kit’s been nailed down to the bench.
    Roxane leaves it there and squeezes into the cage, shoulder-to-quaking-shoulder, trying to laugh with everybody else. As they start the ascent she takes a deep breath and lets gravity push her weight deep into the thick soles of her boots, glad nobody can see her face.
    â€œDon’t worry,” says Gloria, the cage-operator. “They’re only joking. They love jokes.”
    The cage is one of the only places in the mine where it’s quiet enough to talk; you can almost hear a whisper over the contented sigh of the conveyance as the cage is guided up the shaft by the line. The cool smooth sound of the wheels and runners against the wooden shaft guides could almost lull youto sleep. But Roxane has to strain to listen to Gloria because of his English. It’s unique to the area and possibly to the mine, where a small subgroup of the language—mostly French mixed with universal miner’s lingo—had been patched together by the sixty workers that drove in from Quebec.
    â€œYou keep the machines in good order,” Gloria says. “You don’t drive too fast or too slow, you help unload the ANFO. You’re a good girl. You keep working hard, keep proving yourself, and one day you’ll be the one nailing lunch kits to the bench.” He laughs and then coughs, and Roxane can hear the phlegm shift in his throat.
    When Roxane first started working underground, Gloria gave her a pair of his old boots and coveralls. It was hard to find the right size because no manufacturer made them small enough for women. Gloria’s wife made alterations for him because he was only five-foot-three. Being so small with a name like “Gloria,” Roxane thought he’d know something about jokes, but nobody ever laughed at him—not even when he was trying to be funny.
    â€œIf they didn’t like you,” Gloria continues, “they’d laugh a different way.”
    â€œLike they laugh at Wycliffe Nichols?” Roxane asks, trying not to sound angry.
    Last shift, Wycliffe was driving the locomotive and its floor fell out from underneath him. The locis are made collapsible so they can be folded up and put into the cage, moved to the tracks on different levels. When the loci’s floor collapsed, Wycliffe had to run on the tracks in the gap between the frame until he could get the loci stopped. If Wycliffe had stopped running or fallen he would’ve been cut in half. Themen laughed at the sight of him running for his life. The shift-boss just stood there, laughing with the rest of them. Roxane hadn’t known what to do.
    Gloria says, “You can’t blame them. Wycliffe deserves what he gets.”
    Roxane knows he means what he says because she can see his face lit up at intervals when the cage passes the golden lights at each level, shining through the gates. Before she can ask what he means, he calls: “Now listen up, everybody. I’m not supposed to tell you, but the second we get to the surface the Captain’s going through everybody’s lunch kits.”
    â€œWhy?” someone asks.
    â€œThings have been going missing around here. Management thinks the miners might be stealing stuff. I’m sure none of you has anything to worry about.” He elbows Roxane and says to her loudly, “especially you, because you forgot your lunch kit.”
    In the seconds after Gloria falls silent there’s a nervous shuffling of heavy boots. Then a
clang
of something heavy hitting the cage floor. Another
clang, clang
…
clang
. Roxane jumps when