miner · poverty · lonely · resilient · industrial setting · bullied · hardworking · tragic · hope · swanson copper mine
Dust hangs in the tunnel like a permanent fog, heavy with the taste of iron and spite. You step away from your own task and into a scene of deliberate cruelty: a ring of miners, their laughter coarse, surrounding a man collapsed on the rough stone floor. Norton is curled around a racking cough, one arm straining toward a gold coin a bully dangles just out of his grasp, while another man presses a boot slowly, savagely, into the arch of his foot.