Help! I’m trapped in the Cairn!
I’ve seen classes online and in-person, campus crowded and empty. I’ve seen buildings around me grow, first years get lost on Main Mall and the Engineering Undergraduate Society hold pranks year in and year out.
But no one has seen me.
It all started when the Cairn was being built. Well, rebuilt. You see, I didn’t get myself into this situation just by chance. It’s my own gosh-darn fault.
The day was March 4, 1988. Me and a few trees (that’s what we used to call forestry students back in the day) decided that we’d had enough of those no-good, red-jacket wearing, ‘We are the engineers’ engineering students. Yeah, you heard me right. Students! But those patch-ridden SOBs crossed the line. Over the years, they would frequently steal Omar.
Oh, you don’t know Omar? He’s forestry’s car mascot. You’re laughing. You think I’m joking. I am not joking.
Like grow up! Stealing a mascot? Real mature, ‘engineers.’ Read a book.
We got to work and destroyed the Cairn. Every piece of that godforsaken rock crumbled to the ground. I laughed, I cried. Those engineers were getting what was coming to them and it was a big mess of concrete. Good luck cleaning that up! With what skills? Biomedical engineering? Losers.
I felt on top of the world. The Engineering Cairn was destroyed, Omar was avenged and his wife, Isabelle, finally got some closure. Their little car children may wonder what happened to their dad, but they’ll know that the Cairn paid for its crimes.
That is, until it was rebuilt.
With me inside.
Almost a year later in February, the engineers were putting up a new Cairn. But this one was bigger and better than the ones that came before it. It was supposed to be a Cairn that no one could ever bring down, but I couldn’t sit around and let that happen — I couldn’t let them get away with killing Omar.
I went solo to steal bags of concrete from the site the day before construction. I couldn’t let anyone else get caught up in this. The engineers had made this personal. What they didn’t know is that Omar is my long-lost stepbrother. I didn’t know until he died and I found a photo of me at four years old with a devilishly handsome car.
I dressed in red so the engineering students (not the engineers, you’re not engineers yet) would think I’m one of them. Red isn’t really my colour. When I got there, there was no concrete. Instead, there was a sea of red.
They knew I was coming. They’d make me pay.
The next thing I know, someone is coming up from behind me with chloroform and the last thing I saw before my eyes closed was those jacket-wearing, calculus-doing, school-spirit having, iron-ring-wearing a-holes laughing at a tree-hugging, oxygen-breathing, nature-loving, Blundstone-wearing, grass-eating forestry student.
When I woke up, I was inside the Cairn with nothing but the clothes on my back and a small seedling with a note.
“Grow up? How ‘bout you grow up out of this, idiot.”
Ever since then, I’ve been trapped in the Cairn, surviving off of the dew that falls through the cracks and the occasional whiff of someone’s sandwich that I get when people run down Main Mall.
No, where are you going? No! Would you mind helping me out? You’re defacing the Cairn? My house? That’s kind of fucked up. Dude, I am literally trapped in here. Could you grab someone to bulldoze the Cairn so I can leave? Oh — you don’t want your paint job to go to waste? Okay, no worries.
Maybe next time! Okay. Bye.
Hey, you! Help! I’m trapped in the cairn!
The Dingbat is The Ubyssey’s humour section. You can send pitches or completed pieces to blog@ubyssey.ca.
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