Issue 12 Editor’s Prize for Fiction
I am lying in the heady decomp-heat of some assorted grocery-store vegetables that have been delicately laid out for me weeks before. I am sleeping in the oil-slick dirt. There’s something I’m infected with. An itch that originated from somewhere underneath me, coming to rest under my shell, wherever they could burrow. They are small, with legs.
I can feel them struggling to get deeper, desperate for traction on the wet of my skin. It’s exhilarating, in a way. Like anxiety manifesting into a thousand burning spots. I can just wait for them to get deep enough, and then everything’s over. Death, for me, is kind of like waiting on a sneeze. You think that’s it, you feel it, and then, and then, and then…
—
Before, it was all dark grottos and loam-living. I chewed dirt like cud. Everyone used to tell me what a sucker for nutrients I was, like, “You were born to do exactly this.” I traversed topsoil with a purpose that ran DNA-deep. I want to be remembered exactly as I was back then. At least I knew how good I had it. I was proud.
One summer, I found this incredible hole bored deep, real deep, underneath a tree trunk. It ran almost end to end of the roots of this massive dead oak. Pretty ritzy, in my personal opinion. The moisture level was crazy, chockablock with nutrient-dense mud wells. I thought I could make a home there, filter-feeding in wave pools and suckling the wood. I counted my blessings, day in, day out.
Anyway, during the tail end of that summer, I slid up from underneath that oak. Might as well get some sunshine while it lasted, I figured. It got cold pretty fast out there. I thought I would relax, get fat, maybe pray for rain. I slipped through the sodden leaves, decayed and melting into each other, and was happy. The soil was rich and didn’t stick to my skin as I glided over it. It was almost the texture of clay but less dense, and aromatic from heat-death. I took in greedy mouthfuls. I wanted to be heavy with it, to sink into the ground with fullness, encumbered with satisfaction.
And then it was cold. There was no mud below me, no leaves, no great trunk. I receded inside my shell, floundering. My first thought was birds: I was in the claws of a hungry sparrow hundreds of feet in the air. Serves me right for wanting to stretch out in the sun, in plain view. I had gotten too comfortable, too happy, and this was my just dessert. That was the first near-sneeze of death.
I was soon set down on a warm, dry surface. That ruled out birds. I felt steady pulses thumping within it, a calloused surface that branched into five tensile trunks. This was something living, breathing. The cool air sighed around me. Peeking an eye out, the sky had never looked so close. It stared back, one colossal cerulean eye concentrated in my direction. The air froze in my throat. I was afraid and averted my eye in deference. I hid, retreating further into my shell. The fear stayed.
My eyes shut, the living thing began swaying, rocking me like a lullaby: back-forth, back-forth. I rolled in the salt of their sweat. I felt suspended in water. The wind was shrieking past the hand that held me; the salt stung my skin. Above me was a vast and infinitely deep ocean. I imagined if I were let go, I would fall upward into that great cerulean eye.
—
I ended up living somewhere very different from the grandiose tree trunk. The earth gained a translucent, impenetrable bottom just inches below the dirt surface. There were no leaves to hide me, and none of the nostalgic comforts of home-grown mildew. I was flanked by giant polyethylene structures that caressed the newly ceilinged sky, all colored in ways entirely alien to me. It was all static, nothing alive nor dead. I was the only thing present that possessed the power to die. Maybe that’s why, now, my death seems like such a big deal. When I die, who will look upon these plastic giants with fear and amazement? Who will climb the ceiling looking for an eye? Who will relieve me of my body when it begins to rot?
There was no night nor day in this new plane. The sun was closer than I had ever seen, the earth’s end only inches away in any direction. The blind heat anchored itself to my every cell. It forced sterility on the soil, making it dry and unforgiving. Dirt clung to me as I tried to traverse it and followed me into my shell. There were no mud pools for me to filter-feed, no water dropping from the delicate tendrils of a dead oak. Here, water flowed like syrup: sticky and slow. I searched for shade in corners, hoping there was any escape from the blistering sun. When I found water, my throat was too stiff to swallow. I would touch my temple to the lingering moisture and will the cool feeling to travel down my body and make me whole again.
It never did.
I can’t know if I slept during this period. The light seemed to erase all temporal power. With no sequences of events or memories to connect one moment to another, my life existed in its totality all at once under the survey of the light. It scattered me. The boundaries between myself, my life, started to melt. My skin shone like the dust particles that danced under the new sun. Something in my stomach tickled as I exhaled the super-heated air. That could have been it, the sneeze, and then, and then…
The light snapped off as one of its internal mechanisms failed. Night fell, so I was alive. I can’t remember feeling grateful.
—
At least I stopped starving. From above, as if by miracle, fell chopped-up vegetables, leafy greens, and eggshells, divvied up and distributed haphazardly around the dirt. During the light, they dried out too quickly to be used as a reliable water source, but now, I could rest on top of them and wait for their artificial coldness to sink into my skin. I hadn’t liked the cold before, but it had become a welcome contrast to the fever that bound me during the heat-drunk lifetime of the now-dead sun. Of course, with the nascent combination of moisture and time, came rot.
Under normal circumstances, I am extremely comfortable with rot. It’s my food source, heat source, shelter, the proverbial stomping grounds I was born into. I can still see that massive tree I made home, the flooding, the marshes in fall, when summer shrubberies encrust layers of green, red, and yellow onto the earth. Decaying plants tucked me in, constricting tighter and tighter as the dissolving layers absorbed into each other before fusing into homogeneity completely. Their miasmic warmth kept me hidden, safe. I was fed, watered, and loved by the earth as it consumed and reformed itself. It was, is, the eternal substance of nature that once held me. I hope to be accepted back into that substance after I concede my tiny life. I am so far away from those eternal marshes now. Still, there is rot.
The problem became the speed and deftness with which the very limited number of vegetables I had been given began to melt away. Cucumbers became cratered puddles of slime that saturated the still-dry soil. Carrot skins mutated into a foul-smelling bark. This rot, by virtue of its unnatural limitations, could not absorb itself into the dirt. Instead, it festered, suffering its separation from the infinite earth. It called to agents of decomposition through its odor, like a cry. As they always do, they came.
Tiny white mites appeared from under the earth as if they had been incubating there. I wondered if they had been waiting for me. Next, I wondered why they hadn’t taken me yet. They covered the grocery clippings like a plague, moving as a single substance. They concentrated themselves on transporting the rot back to the earth by piece-mail, like ants feeding the colony. The rot would return to be buried where it belonged, to be taken back by the infinite.
I shiver at the scale and efficiency of their procession. I thought about calling for them to take me, but I can’t speak in a way they would understand. I would have to talk like the bits of carrot and cucumber: mark myself with death. The mites slip through the slats in the ceilinged sky and don’t take me.
I’m excited thinking I could go home soon. I don’t know if I can relax enough to die. I think the itching is the mites hoisting me up to carry me home, timing out the exact moment the earth will want me back. I just have to wait now. I just have to wait.