The Hole I Lost Mom to

Five days since I last saw Mom. Jenine Killian…….forty-six years old,......five feet three inches of pale brown skin and dark hair thick enough to house a family of squirrels. I’ve only seen her once without her rust colored cardigan, three sizes too big. Probably belonged to dad. Can’t say I know how tall or old he was when he passed, leaving a deep hole in our lives.

It’s hard to mourn a memory you can’t really feel. Trust me, I’ve tried. It haunts you like a ghost without a tie to this world, roaming to avoid what comes next after earth. What comes next after you accept death and move on with life, knowing you trampled a dead man’s grave? I’m not ready to turn over that stone yet. I think it would break Mom’s heart.

The last time I saw her, she had been sitting on the porch, looking up at the stars like they were little chunks of meat in a murky stew, her eyes swallowing them whole. I had woken to find her bed empty, running around the small house like a rat on fire.

I had calmed down by the time I found her, my arms wrapped around her thin shoulders from behind. I promised I wouldn’t cry. Ever since dad passed, I promised not to cry in front of her again, but I couldn’t help it when the scent of her tea tree wash hit my nose and brought me home. But she kept staring up, miles away from me. I couldn’t meet her eyes in the dark.

Had to drag her back to bed like a moon-hungry corpse, calloused feet dragging on the old wood with each step. The boards were water-damaged and dirty, but neither of us said anything as long as they kept our world from caving in, raising our bodies up from the earth.

And then she was gone again. Her side of the bed was still warm from her furnace body but only her indent was left to hold. She always got up before me, but she’d tuck me in or cover my feet before getting up. Sometimes I kept her up with my thrashing and turning, but she didn’t say a word about it, always making sure I woke up under the covers.

Not today. There was no bowl in the sink, no shoes by the door, no sign of life other than my breath taunting the cold air. The lock on the door taunted me as well, good and loose for anyone to walk in, or for Mom to walk out.

Five days was long enough of a wait. You know after a certain time, whether or not the one you love is coming back, it’s a connection you share, and I knew damn well she wasn’t. There was a thread that hung between us and was tugging me outside, tension strong enough to hurt.

Her shoe prints had been washed out by the rains that fell relentlessly in March, leaving me only my intuition to follow. Water droplets pelted me as I pushed brush aside and entered the dark shade of tall pines hanging high as the gallows. I couldn’t see the tops of them, staring up like a clueless ant at the base of their trunks. I remembered what mom taught me; each ring inside indicates a year of life, thickening into a hard badge of honor. Somewhere in the center of all that bark and wood was a mark that represented its start, a first year that stained the inner rings dark like a mole.

“Mom!” The word rang empty in my lungs, beating hard like pots against pans. The longer I called her name, the more it became an unanswerable question. She was either lost or didn’t want to be found. Maybe she didn’t care.

Mom!?”

“Mom?”

“mom?”

I nearly fell into the gaping hole in the heart of the woods, looking up when I should’ve been looking down. Soil fell away under my feet, exposing parched roots to be enveloped by harsh Spring.

My eyes drifted down, down, down until they hit gold. Fifteen feet down, there she was, digging, nails broken and filled with bloody dirt that flew out behind her. It covered her from head to toe like a flailing mound of mud.

“Mom?”

The hole was too deep to slide into from where I stood, watching her dig herself to hell. She didn’t look up at the sound of my voice, didn’t show any indication of acknowledgement.

“Mom!”

The louder I shouted, the harder she dug.

“Mom, stop digging! I’ll get Dad’s old ladder!” Her hands continued to scratch at the ground like meaty crab claws in the sand, growing farther away from me.

“Mom, stop!” For every inch she dug deeper, I grew an inch taller until I was a giant towering over her desperate form. I was a gardener watching a mole dig blindly in the garden, watching her eat away at my crops and shit on my shoes. I’m not an angry person; I don’t know why I think these things.

I came back several hours later with the old ladder that threatened to crush me under its lanky form, only to find her another two feet deeper. The sun was high enough to highlight the angry redness of her eyes like too lumpy balloons. I wanted to slap her silly until they popped.

The silence was almost as loud as the pressure building under my skin. The hole created a bubble around us that pushed the outside world out and trapped me inside with the stranger living in my mom.

“Did I do something wrong?”

Her breaths grew ragged, a dry pant slipping out of her lips and planting itself between her grubby little toes. They looked like rotten carrots. I wanted to bite them off.

“Not… yghh”

Mom’s voice crackled into gruff static behind yellowing teeth that held to her gums like baby birds not quite ready to leave the nest. Another rumble slid from her throat.

“Not… you…”

It was the only answer I received, even as the sun fell out of the sky and crashed below the horizon. I had given up asking questions, knowing she wouldn’t even glance my way.

Whatever destination her body was pulling her towards, she had found it. Digging on her knees like a dog, her upper half disappeared in the dirt while the lower half flailed above. I grabbed a leg and she kicked. Her bony legs were thin squiggles paddling in the night air and pushing her into the earth.

Often when I was a kid, the two of us played peekaboo in a bathtub full of suds, mom’s face popping in and out of a bubble beard to my three-year-old delight. I always knew that once she vanished from sight, she would return seconds later and put my world back in place. But dirt isn’t the same as bubbles. I knew Mom wouldn’t pop out of the ground, and if something did, it wouldn’t be Mom.

On hands and knees, I crawled in after her, met with a face full of dirt that begged me to let it in, I was seconds away from drowning like a corpse sinking into deep sleep, until the earth opened under me.

Cold darkness slapped me across the face like a slab of beef in a meat locker, its contents roaming the underground chasm rather than hanging from the ceiling. I could hear them; shallow gasps and dry coughs filling the space. Morsels of sunlight trickled in from other holes similar to the one Mom made, solemn adults falling through and joining the masses of bodies that already roamed the dirt-ribbed tunnel. Each had the same dug-out face and bony limbs, walking on weak, muddied feet that threatened to let them fall.

“Mom?”

Only pieces of the tunnel were illuminated at a time, but it was enough to have my stomach plummet through the floor. Mom disappeared into the herd of unrecognizable faces, each forgotten like bodies in the morgue.

“Mom!”

There was no point in crying out. No matter how hard I screamed, cried, prayed, she wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t look my way. No one did. They were all walking the same narrow path, and no one could stop them or steer them back. Not me, not the other children picking through people to find the one that matched their own. Young kids ran past me, their furry heads hitting inches below my shoulders. Their little hands reached for every hand that swung above and found none reaching back. The older ones had their hands stuffed in coat pockets with their heads down, halfheartedly searching. We were the ones too old to hope much, who grew up to find ourselves down here.

I couldn’t keep track of how much time had passed below the surface, wading through pools of parents lost in their past and the kids dragged along with them. It must have been hours before I found Mom, standing close to the wall with the blank look in her eye that I was used to seeing before dinner, when she set the table and forgot for a moment that there were only two of us to feed. The third plate was instinctual. She would come back to life moments later as if it had never happened.

Seeing her like this… it hurt. I came down here to find my mom, not this husk wearing her skin. This was the woman who said a wordless goodbye to her husband, who alone raised a child too young to understand the weight hanging below her eyes. This was the past living in her present and destroying everything ahead. They say that if you want to know what a child will be like when they grow up, look at their parents. We all know where we’re going in the end.