Episode 17 - Digging
Fire took out the whole damn block down to the foundations, but not our place. Nope. Of course not. I couldn't be that lucky, could I? Three houses left standing for as far as I can see, and one of them had to be ours.
My place stares at me from across the street, the windows smashed, siding melted and curled, and dares me to cross over to it. Dares me. I feel guilty for wanting it all gone, but I do. I want it wiped off the fucking planet so I can let it go. Never wanted to see it again for as long as I lived, but fucking Sandi…
Two years. Least, as far as I can figure it. Two goddamned years…
Still, I had to come, didn't I? Couldn’t let Sandi wander off by herself. Again. She’s all I’ve got now, and it’s not her fault she doesn’t realise that things have changed. That danger lurks in even the most mundane of places… she can’t understand all that. I don’t blame her though, sometimes I have a tough time accepting it myself…
***
I’d woken to the sound of Katie’s laughter in the living room and flushed from my belly to my cheekbones with the joy of living. Rolling over, I reached for my wife – just as our daughter came crashing through the bedroom door in a clamor of thrashing limbs and giggling.
“W’n’f?” Lily said, covering her head with her pillow, her wedding ring glinting in the early morning light. “S’early, sweetie.”
The alarm pipped a second later.
“Nope,” I sighed. “Right on time.”
A minute later I stumbled across the kitchen floor in my thick dressing gown while Katie raced through the kitchen, around and around the island before deciding she needed to pee. The bathroom door slammed behind her, loud enough to summon Armageddon.
I flipped on the coffee maker and stood there swaying and yawning. The dog yipped and like magic, Katie materialized, opened the sliding door wide and watched her four-legged friend bolt out into an early winter morning. Struck by a wave of incoming cold, I snapped at her to shut the damn door. Katie was startled into inactivity for a second and then complied, pouting while my gut twinged with guilt at my tone.
“C’m’ere, punkin,” I said. She took her time, a finger pressed to her bottom lip, so I stooped and scooped her up, plonking her on the counter, plucking two boxes from the pantry and waggling them before her. “Cheerios or Froot Loops?”
“Mommy doesn’t want me eating junk on school days,” she said, but her eyes were round, hopeful.
I remember the same melty feeling in my gut then that I’d had when I first held her. She was so like my wife, that heady mixture of innocence and guile, that transparent way of manipulating. The apple of my eye.
I put the Cheerios back, but set the Froot Loops on the bench near the coffee pot. “Froot Loops for me, then, and broccoli for you.”
“No way!” she retorted, then caught my smile and flashed one herself, mischievous, seeing a way to gain the upper hand. “You get the broccoli; I get the Loopieloops.”
I sighed in mock dismay. “Go wash your face and brush your hair. If you’re back here in ten minutes with your school clothes on, you get Froot Loops. Otherwise...” My hand crept through the air towards the fridge. “Bro-co-liiiiiiiii....”
She squealed, slipped off the island and bolted for the bathroom, yelling at me not to start counting until the bathroom door was shut. I grinned as the door slammed again and turned to face the counter, snorting coffee fumes.
“Bringing that coffee anytime soon?” Lily called from the bedroom.
I heaved a mock sigh. Slave to a gaggle of girls, that was my lot. Keeping my two girls happy. Three if you counted the damn dog.
***
January has always been cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, but this year it's even worse than usual. I expect it's because the city's empty now, more or less. No power running, no heat leaking outta the buildings, and after the fires, well, there's not even many buildings standing to cut the wind. To cut the wind: there's a fuckin' joke. Nothin' cuts the wind, the wind cuts you. Stabs right through you like a goddamned knife.
I look over my shoulder at Sandi. Checking on her. She's wandering through the rubble, poking at stuff buried in the snow. Probably looking for something to eat. I’m hungry too, but it's a waste of time, everything here's been burned to ashes, but why stop her? At least it's keeping her busy. I can’t believe she brought me back here of all goddamned places. Maybe there are more lights on behind her big brown eyes than I gave her credit for.
***
The car trip that morning had been a lesson in distraction. With interesting talk radio – people yapping and arguing about global food shortages, wild weather, the growing epidemic – and Katie playing with the dog in the backseat…
“Shit!”
The bus came out of nowhere. I hit the brakes and the dog tumbled forward from the rear and almost onto my lap. I arrested her fall with one arm as Katie yelled from the back.
“Da-ad! You almost killed her!”
My heart hammered. My temples throbbed. I hit the gas as the car behind honked and Katie continued to pile on recriminations.
“Enough!” I snapped and she fell silent. “If you’d sit still and keep the dog still, I wouldn’t be so distracted.” I shoved the dog back toward her without looking away from the road.
Katie started pouting, but I was okay with that. At least she was quiet so I could concentrate, and by the time we reached the school she’d forgotten to be upset. She climbed out and blew me a kiss from the sidewalk.
In apology for snapping at her, I cranked the passenger window down low enough for her to ruffle the fur on the dog’s head.
***
Crossing the street I'm reminds of all the westerns I read when I was a kid. The asphalt is cracked and buckled with pot holes that would swallow a horse and we’re surrounded by ruined and gutted houses. All except mine. It's standing there like a judgment from God. A great big, box-shaped, judgment from God. Twisted, shattered, battered and broken, but still fucking standing.
Katie's tricycle sits on what used to be the front lawn. Honest to fuck, it's sitting there, right where she left it. It's a black skeleton of a thing, barely poking out of the snow drift and hardly recognizable, but it hasn't moved. Fires might rage, snow might blanket the world, but that tricycle won't move an inch.
Filled with a sudden fury, I snatch it out of the snow and hurl it toward the house. It flies into the door, and Sandi's surprised cry meshes with the smash of wood on steel. Then everything is silent once more, and I'm left with my thoughts. My memories. My tears.
Sandi comes up behind me, presses against me. I think she's trying to comfort me, but I'm beyond comfort. Way beyond comfort. Why would she bring me back here? Here of all places?
I’m so angry I can’t even bring myself to look at her. I know it’s not her fault. Part of me knows. But the other part is filled with white hot fury and doesn’t give a shit.
Still, she presses against me. Oblivious. I can see her breath float up in clouds around us. I jerk away from her, gesturing angrily away. That she understands. She skitters off to the side, and then peers at me through the long hair that hangs in front of her eyes, sulking. Her hair shifts each time she blinks, directing her limpid brown eyes my way, but I won’t be swayed. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her, and if I weren’t here, here of all goddamned places, I’d be a lot happier.
Denial. It’s not just a river...
***
I cut the engine in the hardware store parking lot and grabbed my cell to check the message that had just came in.
From my wife.
Just like I’d known it would be.
I remember thinking, “It’ll be a reminder to do what I’m already doing.”
DON’T FORGET: OUT OF WORK DOESN’T MEAN HOLIDAYS – GET THOSE SHINGLES FIXED MISTER, UNLESS YOU WANT TO SLEEP IN THE DOG HOUSE ALL WINTER.
I locked the car and sucked in the cool dry air of a clear winter morning. It seemed weird that my car was the only one in the lot, but I figured at least I wouldn’t get held up at the checkout.
After assembling the crap I needed to fix the shingles over the kitchen, I shoved the cart toward the register. A forty-something guy leaned behind it, reading a catalog.
“Beautiful day,” Forty-something said and shifted a toothpick from one side of his shit-eating grin to the other.
“Be more beautiful if I didn’t have to go out in it,” I grumped.
Forty-something’s lips clamped shut around the toothpick.
I piled materials on the counter and wondered when exactly my mood shifted from all’s-well-with-the-world to supremely-pissed; probably the text message. Or that goddamn magician busdriver and his un-disappearing act.
Forty-something had scanned the goods, “Ye hear about this fever? They say even the ones who recover aren’t well after. Mis-firings in their brains.” He pointed his finger at his temple and made slow circles.
“You don’t say,” I’d answered.
He took the hint, gotten back to work, muttering something under his breath. Sounded like song lyrics. Or poetry. Maybe a mantra.
***
A ladder lays on the ground beside the house. It mocks me, the way it harkens back to a time when shit like a leaky roof were the worst of my worries. Part of me is pissed at myself for leaving it there. Leaving it there for just anyone to use to climb up on the roof... On my roof. Even if I’ve been roughin’ it in a farmhouse for two years, it makes no difference. It’s still mine.
Mine. Like these memories.
Memories of chasing a small girl around the massive crabapple tree in the backyard, giggling, hair streaming, flaxen in the sunlight--
The crabapple tree didn’t escape the fire with as little damage as the house, but it’s still there. Great black limbs reach like reverse lightning into the sky, stark against its bone white. The trunk, the very same one I’d chased her around, looks like charcoal, but it’s still standing.
Sodden ash and snow squish beneath my boots as I approach, drawn to it like a bullet to the brain. There, where the shade would have been the thickest, lies the toppled over skeleton of the swingset. A cheap metal thing we bought at the hardware store. I spent hours putting it together, cursing and swearing, but it was worth it when Katie saw it. She spent hours on that thing. Swinging, swirling, hanging upside down from the crossbars...
Before the world turned upside down.
***
Fixing the shingles was like fixing my soul, a job with a tangible beginning, middle and end. I straightened, arched my back, kneaded a cramp with the knuckles of one hand.
Yes, the job was good. Nearly done.
The dog whined from behind me and I twisted. She was back in the corner flower garden. Digging.
“Get on outta there!” I shouted, not worrying about the neighbors. “Stoppit! Get outta there, ya goddam disobedient mutt!”
*
I stare at the tree. At the swingset. Because if I turn my head the other way...
“Honest to fuck, Sandi. I could have gone the whole rest of my life without coming back. I really could have.”
They’re there. Just to the right of the toppled swingset, but still within the embrace of the tree’s boughs. Or they had been. I refuse to look. Guilt gnaws at me like bugs at a book’s bindings, but I refuse to look. What if animals have gotten to them? What if the ground settled? What if I didn’t bury them deep enough?
I’d been destroyed when I dug the graves. After weeks of nursing my girls, weeks of fever, boils and wasting, they’d gone within hours of each other. Leaving me and Sandi.
In a tear-fogged haze I dug graves, fashioned crosses out of scraps of wood, scrawled their names across them and wrapped them in blankets as tight as I could. Tight to keep the stink in. To keep the bugs out. Tight as a cocoon, just like how Katie used to ask me to tuck her in. Tight as a cocoon, Daddy. Tight as a cocoon.
Not tight enough. Not deep enough.
The crosses are gone, consumed, I assume, by the fire, but the graves are marked still. Marked by the bowls in the ground. By my wife’s hand, grey and tattered, jutting up out of the ground. The earth around it, a slushy mix of snow, mud and ash, is disturbed. Dug up. Claw marks scar its surface. But her hand... her wedding ring still glints on its finger, catching the cold winter light and tossing it back into my tear-filled eyes.
“God, Lily, I’m so sorry. I’m so goddamned sorry.” I take her ring. Her skin peels off like wasp paper as I pull it off her finger, but I take it just the same. A memory. A token. I kiss it and slip it into my front pocket before I get to work.
The shovel is leaning against the house where I left it two years ago. Its handle has been tempered by the fire, tempered but not broken, so I put it to work. It feels good in my hands. The weight healthy, the ache that spreads through my shoulders purifying. I sob as I shovel. I sob and I talk to them. To my girls. I tell them how much I miss them. How I think about them every day. How I imagine what life would have been like if the plague hadn’t come.
I sob for all the times I spoke sharply to them, every instant with them I didn’t appreciate at the time. I confess how many times I’ve wanted to join them, but how fear stayed my hand. Or responsibility.
“If I go, who will take care of Sandi?” I ask. I know Katie, at least, will understand that. And perhaps my wife will understand that much as I miss them, I’m not ready to give up. Not yet. Not yet.
The sun is falling and the wind has died when finally I put the shovel aside and turn away. Two mounds rest beneath the skeleton of the tree. Unmarked, but not unmourned.
“Sandi,” I call, unsure where she’s got to while I was working. I whistle and slap my thigh. “C’mon girl.”
She comes zipping out of the back door of the house, her tail wagging so fiercely it moves her whole back end as she runs.
“Let’s go girl.” I pat the ring in my front pocket. “It’s time to move on.”
About the authors
Pete Aldin is the author of Black Marks and Doomsday's Child, and a contributing author to multiple anthologies. His story "D is for Death" (from Poise and Pen's C is for Chimera anthology) was shortlisted for a 2017 Australian Shadows Award. He follows Chelsea FC in the English Premier League and is a mad fan of the Breaking Bad universe. His greatest love is coffee, sweet sweet coffee...
Rhonda Parrish is the editor of many anthologies including, most recently, Earth: Giants, Golems and Gargoyles, F is for Fairy and Grimm, Grit and Gasoline. In addition, Rhonda is also an award-winning writer. Recently she’s published a handful of short fiction and poetry. In regard to longer works, her collection of true Edmonton ghost stories, Eerie Edmonton, and her YA paranormal thriller, Hollow, are both forthcoming in 2020. Her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com