Gravedigger
by Athena Lambert
Arizona State University
Athena Lambert is an Arizona native and a recent graduate of ASU, she majored in Creative Writing as well as minoring in Film and Media Studies. Athena will soon join the MFA program in NAU and will continue to practice her craft, as well as study to become a professor of Creative Writing. She hopes that “Gravedigger” will be the first in a long line of wonderful stories, novels, and movies to be produced and made for everyone to enjoy.
I have buried myself at the shore of the lake a thousand times, each time leaving behind a part of myself. The lake behind my mother’s home is littered with my death and is where I continue to be reborn. My first death is my first memory, that of my older brother, Miles, burying me in the sand. My body so small that not even my breathing disturbed the smooth surface of the sand covering; he had tucked me in, then decorated my impromptu tomb with swirls and stars and little boy stories.
The memory skips and jumps; I had fallen asleep. Where Miles and the blistering sun once were, now was an empty beach and a blossoming sunset. The sand was changing as well, likely what woke me up, becoming wetter and colder as the tide came in. Telling this story, I’ve found that this is where people grow concerned and worried about my past self’s well-being. If I hadn’t have woken up, the water could have risen and buried me anew.
To their point, that self did die, I am not the girl who was buried that day. She and I and all the other mes and hers have died and been reborn. But that littlest me, hers was the most important birth. I have a first memory because my brain decided to hit record, it had finally grown enough that I could think and remember, and not just want and need. And it was in that newly thinking, remembering brain that an element of myself was slotted into place.
It was strange. At four, I hadn’t known what I was missing, but I had found it in the sand. The pressure, the weight, the cold impassiveness of the beach surrounding me; it was comfort. The feel of it, forgiving yet unyielding, small little grains that danced up and down my skin but held me tightly when all together, it was a unique sensation to me. One that didn’t feel too much or too little, one that didn’t make me want to scratch or shift, one that just was. My mother tells me I was an excessively fussy baby, crying endlessly whenever held, waking up at all hours of the night. But in the sand I was quieted, I was calm, and looking back, I wonder if other babies felt like this when held by their mothers.
All this time I had been growing memories and discovering sensations buried in the sand my brother had been wandering in the forest. On his return mud crawled up his legs and branches had scraped and scratched him up and down, leaving marks like kisses. He’d come into the house alone, scaring our mother first with the threat of mud on her floors, then again with the lack of me beside him. The tide had reached my chest by the time she had come running out of the house, calling my name in a pitchy, panicked tone.
I didn't see her where she must have stood, desperately scanning the shoreline for the body of her child; I didn't see the relief she must have felt when she saw me, still alive, poking out of the ground like a new harvest. She got on her knees and started digging frantically, throwing sand and mud all over the clean fine clothes she wore, gathering it under her perfect manicure. At the moment it was the greatest wound she could have done to me. I was unearthed crying and yelling and fighting back just as hard as she dug. Like a baby new to a terrifying world, unaware and thrust into lights and noises and fear.
She carried me back into the house regardless of my fighting, reaching out for my first grave, sobbing as the water came and washed it away. I fought her as she fussed over me, as she furiously bathed her two filthy children. I knew what comfort was now, I had uncovered the secret, and it wasn't within my mother's arms, I wanted away. Back to the heavy weight on my chest, the constriction around my limbs, the pressure pushing back on me.
Unfortunately for my mother I wasn’t the only one trying to get outside, Miles complied with the bath and the fussing, but at night he got up over and over again to stand at the sliding glass door. Staring out at the surging lake surface, the sharp hungry maw of the forest beyond it, he had discovered things that day too. He wanted something our little home couldn’t provide.
My mother had told me, when I asked about that night, that we had frightened her. My mother, a star prosecutor who stared down judges, juries, and other lawyers all day with no qualms, had been afraid of the little 4 and 8 year old she had at home. She had told me how she paced the hallway long into the night, keeping an eye on us to assure herself that we were actually there. I had tossed and turned and wailed all night, asking for something that my mother couldn’t help with, and couldn’t understand.
Every time she tried to pick me up and console me, rock me to sleep even, I would kick her away, bruising her heart with every ‘No.’ Coupled with Miles, who stood in the dark by the door and kept frightening my mom, we kept her up for a long, long time that night. We beat at her like the push and pull of the lake outside, sending her back and forth with our strangeness. Until finally I drifted off into a fitful sleep on wet pillows, and Miles was found curled up leaning on the cold glass, asleep.
She told me about how our nanny at the time would report back to her in the following nights, how I requested over and over to be buried, how Miles continued to disappear into the woods. The nanny also found that where before I would usually tense up and freeze every time she would pick me up, after that fateful night, I would actively fight her off. I had met the unique texture of sand covering skin, and every time another person touched me, it was like hot beams of sunlight, cutting through the phantom pressure and burning me.
Mom had told the nanny to keep us in the house all day the next day, concerned about our behavior. We drove that nanny mad that day, with my petulant wailing and Miles’ inconsolable silence. But that day, trapped in the oppressive indoors, I think Miles and I formed a special sort of camaraderie. I would follow him around the house, listening to his stories about what he found in the woods, never touching but always listening. He then would try his best to bury me in our mother’s lovely mid-century modern home.
Dumping out the whole toy box, only to seat me in it and refill it with all the blinking bits and bobs. I remember that one myself, it wasn’t comfortable, but it was close enough. I sat enclosed and dozing and handed Miles his Transformers and Lincoln logs. He got bored, and I woke up, and we wandered again, pleading with the nanny to let us out, gazing at the picture nature made in the window frames. Miles took both his and mines blankets and laid them out in a long train, then took the time to roll me up like a burrito.
That one was fun, our little kid giggling sounding loud throughout the house, but Miles wasn’t entirely selfless. He dumped me out unceremoniously and started rolling himself up in the blankets. I remember crying and kicking him to no avail, now that he wore my armor for his own. He got timeout for making me cry, which only made him more restless. So he resorted to jumping around the living room, imitating the monkeys on the Animal Planet show he watched.
I played monkey with him for a while, running around and screaming, enough that it annoyed him. He started piling cushions and pillows on me in an attempt to silence me. It was heavy and soft and so close to the sand that I did indeed fall silent, breathing harsh and quiet into the small pocket of air that the irregular shape of the pillows made, filling it with hot air.
I remember Miles shifting them all aside to find my face, sweaty and wide-eyed; I remember his soft little voice when he spoke.
“Ollie? Ollie, don’t hurt.”
“’M not hurt, it’s nice, I like it.”
“You like it?”
“Mm-hmm, it’s like the sand.”
“Do you want to stay?”
“Mm-hmm.” He had shrugged and set about making himself comfortable, leaning on my covered body to watch his nature shows. His bony elbows pressed into my sternum through a thick layer of polyester and cotton, weight like the Earth, holding me in her embrace. He buried me and put to rest that version of me that didn’t have a steadfast ally in him.
Our little moment was short-lived, as the nanny came in and shrieked, unearthing me just as my mother did days before. She tried to check me for injuries, tried to make sure I wasn’t hurt, but I showed her the wellness of my limbs and lungs with my fighting and yelling. She put Miles in time out again and called my mother in a panic, holding me firmly against her side, despite how I squirmed.
We went to the doctor that night, my mother scared witless by the strange becoming I was going through, she’d never had to deal with such strangeness before, and she took comfort in the words of professionals. She talked frantically with the doctor; he examined me with a big smile and gave me a lollipop afterward. In the end, he gave my mother an educated guess, words, and phrases that would forever shape my mother’s perception of me, spoken so plainly.
“Without an MRI examination, I won’t know for sure, but based on what you’ve told me, Olive here has an undersized cerebellum. It’s not as scary as it sounds, and as I said, I don’t know for sure. It just means she’s experiencing touch oversensitivity. You may have noticed her pulling away when you touch her.” It was just a flash, but I still recall my mother’s expression at the accusation, pain, and grief. It was agonizing that she couldn’t hold me like she wanted to, and sometimes I feel bad knowing that I can’t fulfill that motherly need of hers.
“Her wanting to get buried in the sand is, I believe, her attempt to seek out Deep Touch Pressure. It’ll be better for her in the long run if you engage her in this, let her do what she needs to, keep an eye on her, of course, but otherwise give her space. She’s completely normal and fine outside of this, so she’ll likely grow out of it, so don’t worry.”
At the time, I wasn’t wholly aware of what he was saying, only that it made the pain leak out of my mother’s face, filling it instead with relief and determination. But if I could, I’d go back and tell him he was wrong, that it wasn’t just the comfort from the sand that I needed, but the death that came with it as well. I needed to bury myself, to die so that I could be reborn, so I could then grow as a person. But as small as I was, the idea of death and rebirth was just a little outside of my grasp. All I knew was that I had an urge that I had to follow, something I needed that I could provide myself.
The night we returned from the doctor is another memory of perfect clarity to me, fed by my own mother’s retelling of it, but the importance of it was not lost to me. She put us both to bed, tucking me in as tight as she could as if trying to replicate the bed of sand I desired. She checked on us throughout the night, clucking her tongue when she found Miles sleeping in the dining room again. But with me, every time she’d open my door, letting in the soft light of the hallway to mingle with my glow in the dark stars, she’d bite her nails once she saw my still open eyes. She repeated this long into the night until finally, she couldn’t handle my resistance to sleep, and she crawled in to join me in my little bed.
I was so small when she curled up around me, holding me tightly, wrapping around me like curious ivy on a trellis wall. Her weight pulled the blanket taught over me, and her arm across my chest was a heavy brand; it was the closest to the sand she could have provided. It was the first moment in my new life as a person who remembered that she comforted me. She smelled like orange blossoms; she always did. It lived in her hair, in the crook of her neck where it lay next to me. It was so clean and familiar that it carried me off to the sleep that the pressure of her body allowed me.
She bought me a weighted blanket after that night to put both of us at ease, and I love it, of course. Twenty pounds spread over me, keeping me small and steady, letting me drift off easy. But sometimes I miss her warmth and her orange blossoms, curled up into a bed much too small for her. Breaking her back to hold me and send me off to sleep, and to bury me, though I never told her, buried in the catacombs of her ribcage. She carried me once more after that night, tucked in beside her heart like she had tucked me into bed.
* * *
Sometimes I would see the little girl my mom wanted me to be. We’d be at the park, and they would sit atop broad shoulders, or held aloft, or even just smile and joke with their parents. They would play funny games and run around with abandon, occasionally they’d be strange or weird, but in the special way that little girls were. They’d fashion crowns of twigs and feathers and call themselves queens, they’d crawl on all fours and play like animals, they’d talk avidly to invisible friends, but they didn’t bury themselves.
This isn’t to say my mother didn’t care for me or love me any less; she was the picture of support. She bought me little buckets and shovels to dig with and started using the back porch as her home office so she could watch me better. Same with Miles, once she finally caught on about his wandering urges. She’d go hiking with him in the forest or take us up to the mountains so he could clamber up rocks and drink in the mountain air and look out on the world. But just because she loved us, loved me, didn’t mean she understood us.
As I got older, around 10, she started shooting me strange looks whenever I got ready to go burying once more. Her brow furrowed, and her mouth pulled to the side like she was tucking her questions away, like she wanted to say something but knew that she shouldn’t. But of course, questions don’t hide well, and it burst out one day, catching us both off guard.
“Olive, honey, are you sure you need to go outside?”
“Yeah, I’ll be back in before dinner.” I was at the sliding glass door, watching distantly, as Miles walked along the shore of the lake down to the tree line.
“But honey, do you need to go outside? For your pressure thing, I mean you have the weighted blanket, can’t you just go lie down for a while?” Her tone was even and acquiescing. She knew how to hide a statement in a question; she did it all day long.
“No, Mom, that’s not the same, I need the blanket to sleep, but I need the burying to die.” Her reactions to that came in fast and quick, from horror to confusion to frustration to a kind of sad disappointment.
“What do you mean dying, Olive?” Even though I wasn’t exactly being chastised at that moment, I still felt the sick curl of guilt deep in my gut, the type that pulled and pulled on my tear ducts until my eyes prickled.
“I mean, when I bury myself, it’s like a grave, and when I’m in it, I leave behind a little part of myself so that when I unbury myself, I’m like someone new, I’m growing. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“No, honey, I wanted you to grow out of this habit.” The threat of tears became the reality of crying, and teardrops ran hot and fast down my face.
“But I like it! I-I need to do it. It’s important!” Our battle of wills was short-lived; she stood and went to give me a hug, soothing words, and sounds falling from the mouth that hurt me like rain after a flood. She looked like she was about to cry as well when I flinched away from her and held myself close.
“I-I’m sorry, honey, I really am, don’t cry, please. You can go, forget I said anything, alright?” She opened the door between us and gestured out to the beach, out to the field of little sticks and stones that she realized, with a grimace, were grave markers. I could tell she still wanted to hold me, wanted to wring her guilt and concern, and my fear and grief out like a towel, but instead, I just ran past her, out to the graveyard. It was a sad death that day, a sadder rebirth, coming to terms with the fact that my mother may never truly understand me.
Later that night, mom made my favorite food for dinner, and we read together on the couch, each with our books and blankets, her leg a heavy pressure against my own. I wanted to forget everything she had said earlier, tuck the pain away between the sofa cushions with the forgotten change. I would talk about the conflicting feelings I had about my mother in the therapy sessions she signed me up for soon after that night.
* * *
I had some friends at school, the other quiet girls who hid away in their stories, and a few extroverted girls who seemed to like our company. As we entered middle school together, I realized they all shared a trait that I didn’t have; they wanted to grow up and be seen as mature. They talked about what life would be like when they were enigmatic teens. They waited expectantly for the breasts and bleeding that would signify womanhood. The ones that had already met that threshold were like a clique unto their own, acting like they now knew all the secrets of the world.
I was terrified of it all, of the growing and the bleeding, of womanhood as an idea I supposed. I had heard people tell my mother, for years, that my strange habit was just a phase; that I’d stop once I grew up. That one day, one glorious day, I’d be the perfect normal girl they all knew I could be. It scared me to think that one day I’d stop burying, but it almost scared me more that I wouldn’t. What would my mother think if it wasn’t a phase, if I’d been me the whole time?
Those questions that plagued me and picked at me during the night came to a startling reality one dreary day. In the middle of an already miserable math class, I felt waves and waves of pain. I sat hunched over and silent in the back of the room, my pain going unnoticed until the bell rang. The teacher called the nurse, and I went from uncomfortable chair to uncomfortable pleather bed.
She took my temperature and had me use the restroom; tears pricked my eyes when I saw the blood. I told her, and she seemed so excited for me, she told me I was becoming a woman, and I told her I was twelve. My cramps were still hitting me hard, and she had no pain medication that she could give me, and since I was firm in the fact that I would not return to class, I got to leave early.
My mom was busy being Janine Sinclair attorney-at-law, so she sent Miles to come pick me up. He often skipped school to wander about town and think. Mom pretended he didn’t, even when she fielded calls from his school, but despite her front of ignorance, she still kept the car keys out of his hands except for emergencies like this. She didn’t want to see his wandering tendencies as a problem, but the fear was always there, that one day he would just be gone.
Luckily today wasn’t that day. He went into the front office and told them he was here for me. They shot him suspicious looks and reached for the phone, then I walked out and ran to him. They saw my easy relief and remembered my earlier grief, and let me go without any more fuss. In the car, he had a big coffee for me, sipping his own as he tapped out a couple of Aleves for me to take. I remember sitting there, curled up in a way that I was nearly too tall to do anymore, weak with pain holding the hot cup to my stomach and exhaling shakily in relief.
“Mom says I shouldn’t drink coffee,” I still drank greedily, seeking the warmth on the inside.
“My friends say it’s good for cramps. Drink up.” And I did, and he was right. The coffee and the pill dulled my pain enough so I could unfold and walk out to the lakefront when we got home. He followed me and helped me dig, wordlessly; I didn’t need to tell him I was grateful. One of the things about getting older was you got bigger, and there was so much more of myself to heal, to care for, to bury.
He took my trash and made himself scarce, and finally, like I often was, I was buried. Only with the press of sand and earth and the sound of the lapping waves and the cut of the cold breeze could I finally let myself cry. I let my tears make an itchy trail down my face, and I mourned. Maybe this was my last burying, and tomorrow would be a new day in a new life, maybe everything would stay the same, just shifting to fit my new awkward in-betweenness. In any case, a little burying girl was laid to rest that day.
* * *
I tried to stop burying after that day, tried to do what my mother wanted, and grow out of it. Instead, I just spent a lot of time in bed, covered by the weighted blanket. I tried to quiet the urge to submit to the sand, tried to ignore that once daily ritual of mine, but it still called to me. I spent most of my time sleeping because if I didn’t I was anxious and twitching and overwhelmed, nothing could soothe me but the pressure and coolness of the sand, but that wasn’t an option anymore.
I felt like a child lost in the woods, like a baby left alone, I felt like the child before the sand. Adrift in a world so unfamiliar and hostile to me, the only difference was I was withholding the solution from myself, I was hurting myself with the lack of it. It hurt more when I noticed how my mom smiled at me, relieved that my strange phase was over. Though it didn’t take her long to notice my despondency, she sent me to therapy more often, without asking me herself, and it helped to have someone to talk to. My therapist told her I needed more, attention, activity, life; all of it.
So Mom had me join a sport, any sport, anything to get my blood pumping; to remind my body it was alive. I ended up doing track and field and it worked just like Mom hoped, arms pumping, legs burning, heart racing; symptoms of being a real living person. I found it exhilarating to race the wind and beat the ground, that which usually gave away so easy to me, hard and unforgiving underneath my feet.
My therapist also told me to bury again, so every day or so I’d go jogging around the lake, sometimes joined by Miles, sometimes just passing by him as he wandered in the forest. And when I got to the other side of the lake, where the sand was as soft as our backyard, I’d bury myself.
The first time felt like coming home after being lost for so long, the relief of unrelenting pressure against my sore muscles made me gasp; it was foolish to think I could stop. This went on for a long time, with my secret graves becoming trackers of my progress, first day a mile in 8 minutes, first time I broke a record at school, first time I placed at a meet.
Every time I unburied myself I would swim almost the whole way back, hiding the sand in the water, washing away the secret. I told my Mom I was practicing for a triathlon and she beamed at me, told me she’d go on bike rides with me; she was so, so proud of me. Mom was my biggest fan, always cheering the loudest, always helping out at practices. She was there when it all ended.
I’d been a distance runner all throughout middle school and up to my sophomore year of high school, I enjoyed the steady repetition punctuated with a great spike of adrenaline. I had become a star on my team; Mom would tell me with a grin through the rearview mirror, I was probably a shoo-in for athletic scholarships. It tempted me though, the thought of more, the thought of being even better, of making her even more proud of me.
So I tried my hand at all of it, the sprints, the vaulting, even the hammers once, but it was the hurdles that were my biggest, well, yeah. It was early, terribly early as practice always was, and I asked to run the hurdle course. My coach and the other girls were excited because I was excited. They all gave me tips, the other girls cheered me on, and I stood ready to go. I had listened to my coach about the correct form, I had absorbed their tips, I swear I had, but that hardly mattered in the face of bad luck.
I flew through the course, hardly touching the ground as I jumped over the obstacles, but something went wrong at the last one. Maybe I caught someone's eye, maybe I saw the finish line and wanted it too much, maybe the Earth had enough of my free-wheeling ways. My foot got caught on the hurdle, I went down hard on my knee, crunch, people came rushing forward but I already knew; it was over.
All throughout the trip to the hospital my mother says I was strangely calm, even when they laid me out on the x-ray table and they stretched my leg in just the way my leg didn’t want to be stretched; I was calm. I was calm when they told me I had a gruesome spiral fracture, that I’d spend three months in the cast, still, I was calm. They gave me very strong pain medication, they told me it would knock me out, that I wouldn’t feel the pain anymore for a while; I didn’t take them.
I was calm on the ride home, even when my mother was fretting around me, trying to make me comfortable, trying to make it better somehow. When we finally returned, I told her in my calm beleaguered voice that I needed help. She told me anything. So I brought her to the backyard, to the lakeside, I put on the shower sleeve for my cast and asked her to dig a hole. I explained between gritted teeth as I stared at my graveyard that was so unattainable to me right now, that I couldn’t dig with the cast on. Her facial expression when I asked her was the picture of perfect surprise.
“But Olive, I thought you stopped, it’s been years-“
“I only stopped for a little bit, remember when I was depressed in middle school and you never asked why? It’s because I was trying not to, but I need it, I really do mom, and I need it right now, please.” My voice cracked and wavered, the cold wind cut my lungs when I took in a shuddering breath. It was the most emotion she’d seen from me that night, maybe the most she’d seen from me in a while.
She stared at me then, still in my track uniform, wearing a bright green sleeve over my freshly broken leg, pain and regret and frustration emanating from me in waves. I like to think she understood me a little more in that moment, that she finally got why I did this, maybe she wouldn’t find it so strange. She did it, I’ll always remember that she did it, but I’ll also remember how she cast her gaze around, stared at me when I wasn’t staring at her; like she was desperately trying to figure me out.
I don’t think she did, at least not before I told her to stop, not when I told her to ignore me for a while. She went inside, passing by me in a cloud of concern and orange blossoms, glancing at me again and again, leaving her strange little bird behind to its strange little rituals, rituals that she believed long dead. I stayed still for a while, shivering as the night delivered chilly whispers to me, gossiping to me about the lake. I don’t know what happened that broke the dam, but suddenly I was screaming, sending my rage out across the lake's surface; sending hot tears down my face.
I stood and yelled for a while, I tore my throat apart with my rage, I slammed my crutches against the railing to make the world sound as angry as I felt. All the hopes and dreams I had in track and field were gone now; dashed upon the rocks of circumstance, as well as the delicate equilibrium I had built with my mother. Amazing how one little break could send everything tumbling down. In the end, I was exhausted, the tears still flowed but I grew empty with their departure. I made my way over to the grave my mother made me. I lay down as gently as I could; the day had been a heavy one.
I started the easy movement of covering myself with sand, trying my best to keep my broken leg as clean as it could; because it had already died. My leg had been broken and casted and mummified, it didn’t need to be buried as well. For the first time, I was two people, two Olives. My body was still Olive, the rising star athlete, Olive, with an athletic scholarship and a promising career in her future. But my leg, my leg was a herald of a new Olive, the one who lost all hopes of such a thing. An Olive whose injury would hurt in the cold, who wouldn’t trust her bones, the strongest parts of herself, because if they could break then what hope did the rest of her body have. So the body had to be laid to rest, had to be put out of its misery.
I stayed in that grave for a long time, until the moon held up the sky and the stars watched me curiously. Miles eventually came to get me; he sat beside me and stroked my hair. Listening to my hoarse torn voice as I told him what happened, he made a few terrible jokes and I laughed, more for the relief of laughing. Then he unburied me, taking special care with my leg, and wrapped a towel around me, acting as my crutch until we got inside.
* * *
I healed, as we all must do in one way or another, it took a lot of time; a lot of talking with my therapist. Eventually, it took a lot of physical therapy and even more time. All throughout my mother was by my side, ever attentive, but I could tell we had changed. That night with her digging my grave, as I solemnly watched, it changed us in a way that I could tell neither of us knew the full scope of. We didn’t try to fix it, we didn’t know if we could, but maybe we should have tried.
Ever since I could remember she smelled like orange blossoms, as a small child it just meant Mom, comfort, and happiness. As I grew older, it still meant happiness, but happiness despite hardship; it meant effort, and I always admired her effort. She exuded strength and effort; she was like walking autumn, the sense of successful harvest and perseverance despite the hardship on the horizon. Inevitably though, there would be hardship, there would be winter, and as the winter of our lives set in the orange blossoms faded.
What comes next was the smell of stale illness, uncomfortable mortality sitting at our dinner table like an unwelcome guest. Mom got sick; she got sick really, really fast, faster than we could catch. We started spending even more time at the hospital, my leg long since mended; instead, she’d lay there wrapped in wires and tubes, breathing like it hurt.
Miles and I would spend long days in her room, reading to her, talking to her about anything; anything to absorb her presence. We spent hours just trying to make memories, we brought scrapbooks and reminisced, talked about the days of our youth, before she got sick. We disclosed those funny things we’d kept secret from her, our little problems that once were so pressing, she laughed.
There was one night, we were both there, we had just finished watching some home movies together on Miles’ old beat up laptop, and I had crawled into bed with my mother. Leaning gently against her fragile bird bones, making sure as not to pull on the many tubes and wires that left her. It still made me twitchy, the contact with her, and her hand in my hair that ran through the thick strands only made it worse, but I tried my best to ignore it. I tried to give her what she wanted, while not acknowledging why I might be doing it.
Her hand paused when my whole body involuntarily flinched away from her, I felt a tear drop down her cheek and onto my scalp, I felt my own eyes well up with tears. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to her, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t imagine my world without her. When the shaking of my shoulders and the hitches in my breath and the crawling of my skin became too much I finally moved away from her. Standing with my palms pressed to my eyes, putting pressure on them until the hospital room fell away into bright stars.
“I’m sorry, mom, I’m sorry.” My words fell like my tears and I moved away from the mess to clean myself up, I wasn’t strong enough for this. I didn’t see her hand reach out to me, or her concerned face, but I heard her call out in a voice reduced to a whisper.
“There’s nothing to apologize for, sweetheart,” Silence, the rasp of labored breathing. “Come here, both of you come here.”
Miles moved away from the window where he had been looking out of, I kept wiping my face, pulling tissue after tissue, until I finally came over to join him. He was kneeled down beside her bed like a knight, holding her hand and gazing somewhere far away, I sunk down into the chair and waited.
“I love you two, and I know I haven’t always known how to help you, but I’m not going to let this illness keep me from taking care of you.” She opened the drawer of the little end table and took out a thick professional looking folder, the kind they used at her work, the kind we’d seen all our life when she brought her work home. She opened it up and pulled out the familiar template of a last will and testament, I started crying again. “I drew this up yesterday, just in case I don’t make it-”
“But you are going to make it mom, you’re going to be fine.” The conviction in Miles’ voice was hollow, and he took the paper offered to him with shaking hands.
“But if I’m not, you both will be left plenty of money, and Miles you’ll get the car,” She stopped talking with a laugh, holding his head in her hands. “You’ll finally get the car honey. And Olive, the house will be in your name.”
I looked up at my mom, she looked tired and fragile, but her gaze was content and full of love. She’d given Miles his freedom and she’d given me my beach, whether or not she made it, she accepted us.
Unfortunately, my mother knew her body, she’d kept a steady eye on the clock of her life, she’d watched as the sickness had pressed it’s thumb on the hour hand, punching it closer and closer to the end. That dreaded sickness was the type that turned happy stories of childhood into cold scenes of a rainy funeral. That turned parents into ashes, and ashes into urns. That turned a lively thriving home into a port of call, with two siblings circling it like boats in a storm with no lighthouse.
Miles and I wandered listlessly around our home, my home, which was steadily filling with platitudes and dinners from other homes, with gaping wounds from the death of our mother. She’d given us these keys, but did she know why we needed them? Did she know who she was accepting? Or was it the final act of a dying woman? Our baggage weighed us down, tripping us up throughout the day, pulling at the sick empty feeling within us.
So we talked, we vowed to do the understanding that our mother couldn’t, he talked about his thirst for freedom, his desire to get lost and find himself. He told me that now that he could do it, now that he had the car and the money and the time, he was afraid, the world stretched before him and he was so very small in comparison. I talked about dying and being reborn, about growing like a plant in the earth. I told him that the world scared me, that it felt too busy and loud for me, that no matter how big it may seem it wasn’t big enough for a little burying girl. And eventually we started feeling less empty, less alone, we helped each other.
He helped me bury Mom as well, when I finally couldn’t take it any longer. They’d put her in an urn, we were supposed to carry her ashes with us through life. Allow her to watch us grow from the dusty mantelpiece. The thought of it made me ill. It was a selfish way to maintain a loved one, it trapped them for you to perform for, but that wasn’t any way to end a journey, to end a life. So in the front yard, I dug a hole, digging through grass and soil and clay instead of my usual sand. I dug a big hole and I took the urn from Miles who watched cleanly.
I dumped Mom softly into her new home, most of her at least, brushing some dirt back over her, integrating her into the earth. I set the urn to the side, that last little bit Miles was going to get put into a locket. He was going to take mom with him on his wanderings and adventures, she was going to see the world just as he was.
I sat on my heels and stared at the pale ash mixed with the deep, rich earth, it was my first burying, my first death, that wasn’t of myself. I almost expected to be handling it better, with my years of experience, but that was not so. My mother’s absence was surreal to me, sometimes I’d come into the kitchen and expect to find her, or I’d open my mouth to call out and ask her something, but there would only be silence. As easy as I had dug this hole in the earth, her death had dug in my heart. But maybe someday I could make it smaller, I could fill it with new, good things. As if sensing my thoughts Miles came forward with the sapling and I stood up, together we planted it, an orange tree, and sealed over the hole; I cried when it was done.
“I hope she likes it, I hope she doesn’t mind being a tree, I thought it’d be beautiful.” I sniffled loudly and Miles ruffled my hair.
“I think she’ll love it, Ollie, I think it’s what she’d want.”
“I don’t know what she would want; I never knew what she wanted.”
“She wanted the best for you, for me, for us.” His words hung softly in the air, we both were trying to admit the small truth into our overcrowded minds. She never really understood the two of us, her strange brood, but it was true she always tried to do right by us. She put effort into the world, into her actions, and she tried her best. That was what she would want, for us at least.
Interview With The Author
1. What was your inspiration for this piece?
This story, very rarely for me, started at the beginning. 'I have buried myself at the shore of the lake a thousand times,' I thought of that line and just had to write a story to go with it. Though once I started writing it I found that the emotions of the piece really started to carry it forward, in this and other pieces like it I'm really trying to get at the root and explore these strange, wonderful, difficult, and often ugly feelings that young girls feel.
2. What is your creative process?
When I write it's like I'm solving a puzzle, I'll have ideas for scenes and dialogue that won't come until much later, so the game is to write and bridge those gaps until I can finally write them. Sometimes the story is exactly what I wanted, but more often it grows and becomes something entirely new.
3. What are some influences on your artistic process?
I would say the media I consume is my biggest influence, video games, tv shows, podcasts, movies, stories, and especially the music I listen to, folk, rock, punk, classical, jazz, bluegrass, the images, and feelings they inspire in me really fuel my process and ideas. My biggest piece of advice would be to watch, read, listen to all of it, and chase whatever ideas inspire in you, let them water your artistic soul.
4. Is there anything more you’d like our readers/viewers to know about you or your work?
Gravedigger is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever written and it's such an honor that other people enjoy it as much as I do.