The Hole
Wait at least twelve weeks before telling anyone, just in case it…
Dies. My body is sprawled on the bed. I’m mostly limp, but every few moments my abdomen wrings me like a washcloth, and I flop, I twitch, I gasp for air.
The Florida sun is going down, bringing me the terrors of night. My fingers are clenching my bed sheets, and if I turn my gaze away from the open window, I know I'll find holes in the deeply blue fabric.
This is déja vu. My tireless fingers, the view of sundown– I’ve smelt sickness before. Different bed, different sheets, different house, but it’s the same Florida heat eating through the air conditioning; what reeks is the same odor of sweat and despair. I’m remembering the weeks after my grandmother, my caretaker, my lifeblood died. The commonplace tragedy happened in the middle of summer. Cancerous cells bloomed in her chest, and I was left holding her pulseless hand. I was freshly nineteen and she was dead at seventy-two.
Now I’m somewhere in my thirties, bleeding on my bed like a gutted fish. I know exactly what’s happening; I feel exactly what’s dying. Reluctantly, I reach between my thighs and find what I already know: deep reddish-brown tissue, clots, moisture. I’m stoic, I’m silent, I’m delirious, yet so aware of the truth. But for now, before the sun leaves me, and before I have to clean the mess of what could have been my daughter, I’ll stay looking outside, dreaming of her possibility.
When Florida makes your world look like something familiar and kind is tangled in the golden light, the ghost of my daughter visits a hole in the backyard. Her name is Agnes, after my grandmother. I watch her visit this hole during the time when faces turn soft, when they’re drenched in an apricot haze. It’s when I can clearly see her face– tiny and of a dark honey, sweetly humble. She looks so much like me.
Life looks hazy in this light. Green plants are washed in a tender fog. Palmetto roots sleepily spread across the yard like a gallery of Chinese fans. There's peace written in this light. You notice things, nature, in a personal way. The oak tree becomes a haven towering over your house, then it becomes a mere signal directing your attention to the watercolor sky. And because the land is so flat, sometimes it feels like you’re standing in front of the sky rather than beneath it. You're always being cloaked by the atmosphere; every part of your body is covered in pink hues, and they blend together like lovers on a sofa. You begin to think this phenomenon is meant for only you. But then you hear a choir of cicadas buzz in their steady, high-pitched click, and you realize the beauty is drenching them too.
We’ve found ourselves here, at the hole, after snack time. While leaving the skin and sucking the juice of a tangerine, Agnes found one of its white seeds buried in the slimy enclave of her mouth. She spit the seed into her palm, bubbles of saliva following, and stared inside her hand with curious little brows. I was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, watching her feet dangle off the chair– she’s too short to touch the floor. Her tiny body began to wiggle past the backrest: bottom, torso, shoulders, head, all consecutively slid downward until her sticky toes stretched onto the floor. When she did this, I could hear her whisper one, two, three, four, counting how many ambitious movements it took to finally touch down. Her voice is small, but I can hear it more clearly than anything else in my life. It makes her feel so real.
She’s sitting on the grass in the backyard. The seed rests in her pocket as she claws through the earth with bare hands. I watch her, somewhat appalled, mostly curious. The child is a bleeding image of action, of randomness.
Baby’s fingernails caked in soil
the earth– breathing us sweet
in a wilting sun
one taking off, setting sail
leaving.
only for
hoping She
comes back in this eternity.
She sits at this hole in the golden air with grief. She expects a flower, a fruit, something green, something growing, but all she finds is a hole. Dirt. Sand. A vacuous shape. Disappointment.
We’re not sure how much time has passed, but it feels like the duration of a life, then I remember how those instances are different for everyone– much too short for many. Somehow, she blinks, her eyelashes flap once like a battery-powered doll, and the seed is gone.
I see my reflection in her shocked visage. Agnes never covered the seed, never watered it. She just dropped it into the sad ditch like a penny in a well, casting a wish too ignorant to grant. I guess it was selfish to expect that seed– which probably shriveled, combusted, died of heat exhaustion, or got pecked by a White Ibis– to become something more than a fruit seed. But what more could I have done to make her grow?
Her head plunges into the abyss. She sits there, waiting. She’s stoic– that’s Mama’s girl.
She finally comes up for air. There’s dirt and snot mingling in her nostrils, I want to wipe her face, but I remember how far away she is from reality.
Agnes goes inside the house and peels the last of the tangerines. No seed. No luck. Agnes doesn't cry, whine, or pout at the emptiness of her syrupy palms. She sighs, maturely, and feeds the orange peels to a cluster of grateful Ibis’. Her belly is bloated, stuffed with pulp, and she looks so real. So full.
The smell of citrus is suffocating, though. Tangy. Sharp. Sunny. A smell that forces me into thoughts of joy until the sentiment disappears and it just smells like an orange again. But the color of those peels, orange, looks so lovely on her velvety skin.
Agnes began to pray for the hole: knees imprinted on the land; little fingers interlaced. She squeezed until shades of persimmon splotches decorated her hands, blood ready to pour past her skin.
And nothing grew. Maybe I should have told her that her earnest nature would never be enough to birth something other than a house for nothingness. Maybe I'm a bad mother for taking pleasure in seeing her quietly sad face become lit with apricot this evening. I found an irresistible pleasure in watching her beautiful, moronic perseverance. In her glowing body of hope. In her loyalty to disappointment.
I hear her crying. She’s wrapped in my blue, blue sheets. I listen, I swallow, I consume the sound of her baby tears, her childish sobs, her adult lamentations. And then I start to cry. Watching someone’s despair can make you do that. I weep hard. Much. Endlessly. Aggressively. I cry enough to fill the hole.
I live in Florida where my grandmother raised me, where the sun goes down, where there’s a terrible night. I live in that time of day when Agnes visits the hole, when the golden light speaks in embers on our bodies, and we look like pieces of the sun who fell kindly from a blue heaven. I live in a time when it’s night and my thighs are bloody and soaking the mattress. I live in a bleeding image.
“Agnes,” I whisper with an exhale, like swaying Palm leaves.
And her deeply brown, deeply fictional eyes begin to fade from my mind.
“I thought I could make you exist,” I say with certainty, like the roots of a tree.
I blink and she vanishes. Dust floating into the hole.
The sun has set
the hole unchecked
She
shriveled, combusted
a reincarnate Ibis?
and I, bearer
of meaning
of life
have become a hole
an empty organ, a sore uterus
and can grow no life lest it
harvests death. And I
waited 12 weeks.
and so
I am alone
in déja vu
in wanting to be her mother, her caretaker, her lifeblood
and I, bringing
The terrors of night.