Where Holes End

When I was 13 years old, I dug myself a hole. All the other kids in the neighborhood had treehouses. They stared down at me and waved a handful of splinters.

I remember the first time I dug my shovel in and scooped out a clump of fresh, sticky ground. I sat beside my tiny hole for hours, running my fingers around the edges.

“I can stop now if I want to.” I thought to myself. That's the great thing about holes, once you've started it, it's already done. A whole hole. When I was thirteen that was funny.

I kept digging and now I could cover my hole with a blanket topped with leaves and catch stray children with it. It's as big as a walk-in closet, I could walk in if I were so inclined. These days, I rarely play with my hole. Sometimes I'll do some edging or put a tarp over it if the weatherman say it's going to rain. I never go into my hole, it seems vulgar now. To me, it's not the same hole is started digging eight years ago. It's much to deep for a thirteen year old.

I used to spend all day in my hole when I was younger. My face always filthy, constantly smiling, mud stuck in my dimples. My mother stayed inside all day, kneeling at the washing machine with her head in her hands. My older sister used to sit on the rim and brush pebbles down at me. “This is so heavy handed” she would say and peer through the darkness to see me flipping her off.

“This is my hole,” I'd tell her, “You can't come in.” I told this to everyone. Nobody cared. No one wants to go in a hole.

I was 14 the first time I brought anybody into my hole. My friend Lawrence lived next door. His tree house had a couch in it. He seemed ready. He asked. He said he was sick of treehouses, how they were up high, removed from everything. He said he wanted to explore deeper things and I agreed to take him in.

We climbed down and stared at each other uncomfortably for a few minutes before he burst out crying.

“Let me out” he yelled, over and over, and his voice beamed back and forth against the walls of the hole.

“There's no way out” I said. “Once you're in a hole, you just keep digging.”

He tried desperately to climb out but, having never been in a hole before, kept pulling out chunks of soil and falling backwards.

“Here” I said and lifted him from the thighs. “Now stay out.”

He scurried away and wiped the back of his pants.

“Nobody goes in my hole,” I said to myself, and it echoed in dirt.

When I was fifteen I put a kitchenette set in my hole, complete with two chairs and placemats. I put out a package of oreos and some daffodils ina jelly jar. I marveled at my domesticity and then took it all out in order to fit back inside.

“Man creates holes” I said proudly. “And holes are intended for man.”

Manholes. When I was fifteen that was funny.

When I was 16, I rejected holes. I was digging eagerly at my hole when I spotted the mound a few feet to the left that at one time was my hole.

“I have created nothing,” I said to myself. “i have brought new, fresh nothingness into the world.”

I stared blankly at my accomplishment and its inverse.

“That's it, I'm going nowhere.”

My mother stared at me throughb the storm door.

“What are you doing out there?” my mother asked over a turnkey sandwich on rye.

“Nothing,” I said, eyeing my shovel. “I'm making nothing.”

And when I was sixteen, there was nothing funny about it.

When I was seventeen, my physics teacher taught my class about black holes. “A hole can go on forever,” she said. “A hole is the absence of everything.”

I ran home that day filled with newfound enthusiasm. Then I did something that I'd never done in the four years I'd had my hole: I cleaned it. I took out all the rocks and sticks and packed the dirt down with my hand. I cleaned until the floor was so clean you could eat off it. I kissed every inch of my clean hole and licked my lips. “My hole,” I sighed, and the taste of dirt filled my mouth.

I decided then and there that I would finish my hole. A complete hole. It was the first time in four years I'd believed in such a thing. That night, I dreamt that my hole went on forever. I dreamt that I jumped into my hole and fell right through. I passed through the center of the earth and kept going until the ground below me burst open and I flew, feet first, into the other side of the world. The people on the other side of the world crowded around, staring angrily. I tried to explain that my intrusion was accidental, that I'd dug too deep and hadn't considered where a complete hole would end. As I started looking around, I saw holes everywhere. The holes all looked the same as the bottom of my hole and at first, I thought they were all just like me. That we had all kept digging and ended up together, here.

“Here,” I said to myself, “must be where holes end.”

Then the man at the front fo the group swept his hand over the landscape. He told me they had started many holes but the holes went nowhere. He told me they had tried to fill these holes but only made more holes in the process. He told me holes came out into other holes and now they were certain they were doomed to stay there.

Finally, he told me they didn't appreciate some digger flying out of the ground any time he liked.

“I understand of course,” I told the man. “It's so easy to mistake a tunnel for a hole.”

He told me they were going to take my hole for themselves. The top half, previously the bottom half, was now in their soil an rightfully belonged to them. I solemnly agreed, but asked if I could jump down their half of my hole to get back to my own half. The man shook his head, refusing. I tried to explain that I needed to return to the other side of the world, to my family, to my hole. I told them half a hole is useless, because of gravity, because you can't just stop halfway down a hole. I argued until my cheeks turned red and my eyes teared uncontrollably, but the man insisted that if i wanted to go back it would be over topsoil.

“Where do I go to get back?” I asked.

“If we knew,” he said, “we'd never have to dig.”

I laid down and poked my head over the edge of my hole, peering into pure blackness, and spit towards home.

I was eighteen the last time I brought anybody into my hole. It was four years since the disappointment with Lawrence. “It's so much bigger now,” I thought, shoveling eagerly towards the bottom. “A hole built for two.”

Kathryn, the girl I set next to in math class, always asked why I drew circles in my notebook, why I always came to school late, and why my fingernails were always filled with dirt. Then, she spotted a shovel in my locker and I told her everything.

“How big?”

“Big,” I told her, “big big.”

“big enough for a person to live in?”

“Big enough for people to live in.”

“You have to show me.”

After school we walked to my house and went to my back yard. I pointed at it, modestly, as if she could have missed it.

“Shit,” she said.

“I've been working on it for years now.”

“Can i try it out?”

“Sure,” I said nodding. “Tell me when you're ready to come up and I'll throw you the rope.”

After a few minutes she looked straight up and gestured towards me with her finger. I tossed down the fat end of the rope.

“Not that, silly, you.”

“I told her I couldn't go in, that the hole had a limit, one at a time. I told her about Lawrence, about his drippy tears getting all over my hole.

“Salt of the earth,” I said and she stared back blankly. When I was eighteen, puns lost their humor.

“Very funny. Now come down here!”

I tied the rope to the end of a tree and jumped in with the other end. The moment my feet touched the bottom she pushed me down hard and kissed me even harder. She pulled my shirt over my head and unbuttoned my jeans. She lifted her skirt up, just enough, and there, under the rest of the whole world, Kathryn made love to me on a floor of dirt. I looked up at the world above me, looking down at me. “Poetry,” I said to myself under Kathryn's moans before she jammed her dirt cake palm into my mouth. Her cries were louder than any of Lawrence's.

“Gross,” I said, spitting.

Later, as I stared down from above ground, I could still see the marks our bodies made in the floor of my hole. Snow angels without the snow. “Dirt angels,” I said to myself. Not funny, but true.

When I was nineteen, my hole got sick. There was a terrible strom on the morning of my nineteenth birthday. I sat in the house all morning, lighting and blowing out candles one by one, as the sky applauded in delight. My mother pulled my present out of the closet and placed it in front of me. The box came up to my neck and was wrapped entirely in brown paper.

“My favorite color,” I said and kissed my mother on the cheek. I slid my hand along the crease, undressing it with my fingers. Inside the box, under a pool of stryrofoam, was a brand new stereo, complete with two tape decks, a CD player, and a remote control that works through walls. I kissed her again, thanking her.

“You thought it was a new shovel, didn't you?” She asked. I sighed and nodded yes.

That night, after everyone else was asleep, I took a handful of styrofoam peanuts and headed outside. My hole was like a magnificent puddle, overflowing with rain. I rolled up my jeans and dangeld my feet in the freshly formed pool. I reached out my hand, sprinkling the contents over my hole. I watched as each sailed its individual course toward land, raindrops crashing like bombs all around them.

The next morning, my hole had a hole in it.

“Calm down,” I said, as if the news would be very upsetting for a lot of people and it was up to me to keep things under control. “I'm sure there's a rational explanation for this.”

Gophers, I thought, rabbits, or giant worms. Maybe it was related to drainage after the storm, like the rain had eaten away some of the dirt. Or maybe stryrofoam simply wasn't supposed to go in a hole. Maybe styrofoam is for holes what coffee is for ulcers. The word 'ulcer' swam around in my head and plummeted down into my chest.

“Maybe stryrofoam is hole poison.”

Or maybe somebody is digging in my hole.

“That's one thing about digging holes,” I said as if I was releasing a statement on the status of my hole, “Anyone can do it.”

It was scary, realizing that at any time anybody could dig their own hole right into mine. Some person I'd never even met could come chargining with their own shovel and ruin eight years of hard work.

“I will find this hole digger,” I told the ground, “and I will set him straight.”

Then again, I thought, maybe me hole is leaving me.

When I was twenty years old, I watched my hole crumble before my very eyes. It had been months since the new hole had infected my hole, and now, every day, more and more holes made their pilgrimage to mine. The roofs of some of these new holes poured into my hole, paving the way for new ones. “Are you alright, my little hole?” I asked, and it burped and bellowed as it reassembled itself.

I tried holding my hole together with every means possible. Every night, I bordered the sides of my hole with huge boulders or planks of wood. The next morning they had fallen down, exhausted, onto the dirt floor. I tried filling my hole with all sorts of stuff, things I didn't want anymore like old toys and clothes that didn't fit. I hoped that it would form to the structure inside it and keep its shape.

I talked to my hole. I told it to stay. I said “please hole, please stay.” But my hole, wizened with cracks and weak with loosened skin, insisted on splitting and collapsing as I stood nearby, stricken with grief.

The wost part was that by the time I turned twenty one, my hole was deeper than I ever could have dug in a lifetime. It simply kept digging itself. “Bottomless pit” I loaughed, and jokingly leaned over the edge, my hole waving goodbye as it plowed towards its bottom.