The Shot Tower
Created: 2023-06-11 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-03 (18:36:17)Status: completed
I followed the others into the lift and pressed the button. The doors clicked shut. The floor trembled a little and we began to rise. Every time, I had the premonition that the lift would fail. We might make it two-thirds of the way up before it came to a juddering halt and hung there. At some point, after some indeterminate length of time, something would snap and we’d plummet back down the shaft.
As with every other time, nothing happened. Last one on, I stepped out first onto the observation deck. The others followed behind. It’s a nice view, offered one person who went and stood facing out the window. Another silently read the informational plaque on the wall next to it. The other two remained by the lift doors and pursued an unrelated line of conversation they had started back on the ground. As invariably as the lift failed to plummet, the Shot Tower invariably failed to elicit more than a muted reaction from the people who came to see it. A minute or two standing in the afternoon light and we’d all get back in the lift and descend.
I felt, at least, that here was something strange. I had moved here a few years back into this massive complex. The balcony faced north over the rooftops of a descending series of identical buildings. It was a ten minute walk from one end to the other, from my own building down to the Shot Tower. I often made the trip on free evenings after work, that summer.
In the previous century it really had been used to produce shot. From the top they poured a stream of molten lead through a sieve into the hollow centre of the tower, to separate into spherical droplets at it fell, to solidify as they landed in the pool of water at the bottom. It was one of the few buildings out this side of the city and had remained standing alone in the paddocks long after the demand for shot had dissipated.
When the municipality finally sold the land in one great alotment that stretched from the ridgeline to the road, one of the few conditions it attached was the retention of the tower. Which the developer agreed to, and surprisingly, not only did it retain the tower but it wrought this scaffold around it, the observation deck, fitted it with the only lift in the entire complex. An act of strange generosity when so many of the other things going up in this city are on the verge of ruin before they’re even completed.
The windows on on side look uphill towards row after row of apartments. The mountain rising up further behind the. The windows on the other side look across the highway to the empty paddocks which at this time of day are falling into shadow, except where the last sunrays make it through the clouds and western ranges. One sunray coming in through the window casts a prism of light on the floor, where the sieve has been preserved in a block of resin, and turns it a shimmering orange.
No-one else ever comes up here for all the apartments there are. At this time of night and this time of year the residents can be seen on their balconies hanging washing, watering their gardens, watching the same sunset as me; cats precipitously balancing on the brickwork; swallows hunting in the open vacancies. Turn and look the other way. The highway, if you follow it through the underpass leads eventually into the city. Standing here in the waning prism of light, this place feels like the far end of the world.
Endmatter
Tags: @apartments @completed @fiction @vignettes
Return to: Ormulum