Inearth

Inearth
by Marcus Eagan & Isaac Wilder

There was something surprising to her about how hard the earth could become, in the salted wind of mid-December. The earth stood in a solemn heap. The earth was surprisingly hard, unbearably hard. It was brittle and implastic. The mound of earth had a quality of fragility, too - something that goes along with a lack of plasticity. She had expected the earth to deform beneath the weight of the shovel – instead she found herself capable only of breaking the earth, of cleaving it chunk by chunk. The earth was harder than she had ever imagined the earth - and this was only sediment - only the six feet or so of loose stones and ruddy soil between infernal suffering and eternal rest. Her hands were not raw or callused in any way. Rarely before had they broken the earth, cracked the earth, shattered the earth. Rarely had they cleaved the earth into smaller and smaller pieces. Never had she had to fill a hole so big.

The hands were cold. That's why she left me alone. The air and the earth were cold, too. Earth frozen beneath a sheath of snow prohibited life within it. I did not even make use of Earth, I was only being controlled, given one task. She said, "son, clear the snow," but I heard part the waters. From time to time I thought of the places most people know need water. Other times I felt fatigued from the dig and the desire to scoop a glass to refuel. Then I found some rhythm, maybe samba. Some beat my mind hijacked from Latins began to daunt the snow. The tides had shifted, and my mind found solace in sol, Spanish for sun. Its rays that permeated sky pillows we reassuring and on my side. On my face they felt like blankets. Every time I threw a load into the air, a few particles would sparkle. It all seemed too beautiful to be nuisance. Still, it had to be moved. Not even sure why.

The earth had to be broken, and moved. That was the commandment. She was inearthing her father, and the tradition of her people, the people of the book, was that she herself would have to crack, break, and cleave away little pieces of the mound. She would have to feel the crunch as the pointed metal tip of the shovel broke the resistance of the frigid, teeming soil. It was December - the sickness had come a month prior, when the wind was not so salty, and didn't turn cheeks so quickly to a defensive ruddy flush. But now it was december, and here she stood, with a shovel in both hands. You might also say that she had a book in both hands, because it was her people, their book, that commanded her to break this soil and fill this hole. It was just their way - the way that they had done it for generations, these so-called people of the so-called book. But what book? Whose book? Surely a shovel is more useful than a book, when it comes time to bury the no-longer-living, and there is a disconcerting amount of salt in the wind.

The salt dried the skin, yet more salt was needed because it would help to break the ice, in rock form, and with a bit of magnesium chloride added to it, nowadays. Most things had changed for most people, but I still used mittens and the shovel. Neighbors preferred snow blowers. Even though they called their machines that name, I just saw exhaust. Since that was so dark, I could not see the snow, and who knows if the machine blew anything. It was probably just a noise maker that screamed to scare the snow aside. My father, the being that I dug for, told me that was the lazy way, unless you are a senior. "People need to bend their backs regularly," he would say, "otherwise they hurt to bend." So I despised those that only pulled out a 62-page instructional on how to work their snow blowers. To shovel all the water this December had to bring, at least a 400-pager seemed better suited because if you didn't shovel, you would have all day to read, and because a word of scripture might have been the best thing to get you through the approaching hell. Somewhere in time, someone added fire and heat to hell's climate, but I bet there's a "Blizzard" section.