97% | Excerpted Work

A hole in the back. The throat. A penny burrowed through the center of the stomach. Cored cheeks. A dip in her lip. Sand that sifts into her mouth, breath that tastes like salt and stone. The sand wells in the pockets of her mouth still left whole; pools in the soft pits left of her back, hips, legs. She is shrinking.

Behind the well, there’s a rabbit hole. Rounded rubble lines the edge of it, half exhumed, into the well’s bottommost stone. It’s been there since March of last year. I only ever see it when carrying the fresh cut firewood back to the house from the forest. I never round the well otherwise.

It reminds me of too much. Of the pockets, the holes, gaps, the mouths sunken into my body. A body carved; a body cleaved. In summer, the sand clots and sticks to the edges of the wound, pumice and slate. Touching it feels stark, strange; like fingering the edges of a sandcastle; fragile, ghosting; shedding.

I moved out to the farm two years ago. I used to live in Boston. I worked at Harvard. Sociology. My apartment was small and square, not far from campus, but the lock didn’t work. On the night that I moved in, I walked to Lowe’s and bought a dead bolt. I notched it into the door myself. I couldn’t have known, then, that pieces of my body had already begun to melt; disintegrating into sand, forming shallow holes. For so many years, it happened only on the inside; there were moments when breath felt lagging, when I felt an uneven and strange tittering of my heart, but I ignored it. I couldn’t have known. Nothing felt deep enough; it never felt like enough to qualify as something. I called it nothing.

I want to say that I made the choice to come out here. These mountains out in Appalachia, these woods, they seemed safer; a sheet, thin and sheer. Staring through a veil. The cabin was halved when I found it. It lay down in the base of the New River Valley, stretched outward from a broad shoulder of the mountain, into the river, down to the woodlands beneath the railway line. The land is sparse and reaching, but it’s hidden, isolated in the thick forest. I hardly see another soul for days or weeks at a time out here. This place is quiet and solemn. It is without agony.

I am standing in the place where I died. Where my body lay flat, mangled, holed. I am standing where my flesh and bones turned wholly to sand. In the left field, beyond the trees, I lapsed into a dense millpond of sinking summer soil. My body never rose again.

It was a graveyard. Was, is.

My body lay still in the growth there, the shadow of it, in black sand.

When I rose, the earth smelled of lavender. Of wet fruit and dogwoods. It was me that roused from the ground, not my body; severed, as we must have been. I never looked back at the sandy ash on the ground, the shape of my body before. I wanted not to know.

The sky was silver. White mirages of light floated, in shapes of women, bodies not their own. They were holed, too. Empty sockets that glowed alabaster and clear. Ghosts. Souls of a past something. There was one that floated toward me, her ghastly face marked by holes, an aperture of the mouth, cratered, pitted, an excavated plane. Despite it all, there’s a thin smile that lifts, small but whole.

She opens her mouth, and the breached echo of a wailing, hollowed voice sails from the parting of her lips, cavernous and whole. I watch her mouth purse, part, parse. She leans into me, quietly. “This place isn’t empty as it feels, baby. These women aren’t ghosts. I mean, they are, but they’re not, y’know?”

What was left of her eyes lifted to the edge of my mouth. What were left of mine?

“This place is a holding cell,” she said. The holes in our bodies are holed out by those sick fucks, and the things they did.”

I watched her mouth moving. It was abject and strange.

“What do you mean?”

She looked at me intently, her eyes swimming. “You know. The sand, the holes? You fell apart. I mean, look at you, darling.” She kicks the ground, unfolding the layers of shimmering charcoal and dust. “You think this earth is made of soil? It’s black sand, hon. It’s ash.” Her eyes drifted upward, spinning. I watched her mouth, ghastly and narrow, bone-like and translucent.

I looked around my body; touch the earth, rake my hands through the black, silvery ash; my hand came across her foot, and I felt it, solid, whole.

That forest holds inside its palm our cleft carcasses, ghastly and swelled, discarded bodies. It is there we stay.

The farm grows at dusk. Shadows that billow, indigo melting across black grass and earth, shaded sinews that convalesce, inky like sloe. I imagine the soil opening, a bleeding like gored blackberries, over the earth, down to the river, violet water running.

I sit in the old rocker in the living room, dressing the black and blistered curves of my holed, melting feet. Holding my feet over a black bucket, I brush the sand loosed from my body away, curled rocks of hardened blood and gravel, craggy bedrock that falls from my body in an arched, hollow weir.

There are parts of me turned to sand and ash, each melting slowly, sifting away from my body in blood and dirt. Foot, back, throat, stomach, cheek, hips, legs. A body rotting, decaying, but alive, still.

The house is a barrier. The farm, the river, the mountains that stretch, endless, around this valley. I sit in this living room, walk the farm, down to the river and back into the swelled woods, treat the earth and feed the wild animals that traipse it, loan foals or mares, fledglings, saplings, adolescent pups. It’s this boundary that keeps my body whole, that stops my body from turning further to sand, blood and rock turned crimson, gray.

The rocking chair is soft and smooth; as it rocks backward, a slow creak reaches up the chair’s legs. It sounds with the wind outside, clipping the coarsely sealed windowpanes. In it is a song, a hymn, almost.

She walks these hills in a long black veil

She visits my grave when the night winds wail

Nobody knows, nobody sees

Nobody knows but me.

My body began to melt, skin and bone and blood, eroded into slag and recrement, when I was ten. It happened in my mother’s bedroom. Two holes beneath my breast, sand slipping in the shape of swelled bug bites. and again, again. It happened over and over, over, over, over. Chapped lips that scratched the underside of my chest, moved down.

Time passes like nothing in this place. It is a boneless, cored feeling, the motion of the woods falling away like soft stones. As it moves, sun and moon circling each other, my body hardens back into a silver, ghostly thing. The holes and rotted craters that had condensed upon me in life stay, now white and knobby, the gnarled knuckles of an old and buckling tree.

I don’t know how long I lie there. In the ash and dirt, my body decomposing. If it could, it would have. It doesn’t do that anymore. I am dead. A cinereal ghost. I spent what may have been hours, days, dissecting the spectral nothings left of my body. I touched the holes, spaces, gapped craters that composed it, left it coarse and grotesque, inelegant. Pitted.

I can’t remember how I died.

Above me, the same ghostly, phantasmal woman lifted above me, her silver hair blown back in thin wisps. I look up at her, and she opens her mouth, closes it, a welling that is white, blue. Her voice comes into focus, softly, the touch of a palm to a rose, red, dusting.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I say, reaching my hand above my head to touch the dry, arenaceous space where skin used to be.

“What’s your name?” she asked, lowering herself to touch her eidetic feet to the ashen ground. I watch her body crouch beside me, a white feathered hand hovering over my abdomen.

“My name is Dorothea.”

“Is it?”

I look at her, the white spaces of her eyes, no longer.

“No,” I say. “I go by Thea. Went by, I guess. As it is now.”

“Thea.” My name on her tongue, in her mouth, outside of myself, feels aberrant and strange. It feels as if decades have gone by since I had heard it aloud. She stares at me, a white that’s milky and ebbing.

“You know,” she says, “Once you’re here long enough, the place starts to grow on you. The ash feels more like sand, less black, saltier. If you close your eyes and wrap your hand around it, you can almost smell the beach.”

I could feel my mouth shaking, a twittering behind the teeth that leapt up and down, a quiver between my lips. “How did I get here?”

She looks at me, and her eyes clear; the white melts, and I can almost see her pupils, opal and grey. “The same way we all did, darling. Our bodies melted, turned to ash, turned this place, an in between, into a holding cell. It isn’t real, you know.”

She looks away from me, at a sky that’s grey and capacious. “This place isn’t real. It’s an in between step, like purgatory. The ground is made up of our melted bodies, incinerated flesh turned to ash.”

She kicks the ground, spraying ash toward me; rather than hit my skin, it sinks, floating slowly through what would be my body. It cannot touch what isn’t there...