He had disappeared from any of his usual haunts. For days, in rare cases once a week or so, students would bring up his absence. Teacher’s bemoaned the loss of a star pupil for a while longer, but they too gave up after only a few months of inquiry. A notice or two was delivered to his parent’s mailbox. Only the giant aviator corporations, tragically, really investigated his disappearance, sending weekly telegrams of job opportunities, even sending company representatives a couple times. His parents had done a resigned but adequate job of pushing these people away, while keeping his location ambiguous.
“Oh, he’s off visiting his friends.” They would say. Or, “He’s studying abroad.” No one really asked any more questions than that, and business cards exchanged hands before going ending up in the families trash. And so a young man led a life that officially didn’t exist. After a while, no one really came around any more. And he was allowed to return back to life. But he could never really return.
He left the house one day, shovel balanced on the fulcrum of his shoulder. A bottle of water was loosely grasped in his other hand. He was going to bury himself alive with that shovel.
He hadn’t told his parents where or why he was going, and left no suicide note or anything of the sort. He’d tried to write something the night before but it all just seemed really trite to him, it wasn’t his style.
He went out to the park where he’d buried his final item. He gazed at the earth only slightly recognizing the burial marks from over a year earlier. It had rained and snowed while he’d been away studying, and many feet had tramped over this patch of earth. Very few would’ve noticed that the burial had taken place, maybe even just him. But he could. He could remember them all as well as each object they contained. He remembered this on best of all.
He stood over the spot and hesitated only a few seconds before plunging the blade into the soft earth. It was always a little different, that first scoop. Sometimes the shovel would spike off of the ground and send shocks into his hands, with only an inch or so of dirt coating the blade to show for his efforts.
Special care was taken to place the dirt next to him in a pile, for there was no one to fill in the hole after him. He would have to do it himself so the dirt had to be accessible even when he was deep in the hole. He imagined himself asking a passerby to kick the pile in after him and smiled as he shook the ridiculous request out of his head.
He had decided not to be overly grim about this, but he was going to bury himself.
Stress and emotions rolled out onto his face in warm long strands, breaking his stoicism for the first time in years, like the first rain on a dry, sandy, monolith. He grinned as he brushed the tears away. This isn’t me, he thought. He supposed it was a slowly expanding balloon that had to pop eventually.
The tears were soon replaced with a different liquid, the sun roasted over the dig site relentlessly, and the water bottle started getting lighter than he thought it would’ve by this point.
It’s surprisingly easy to kill one’s self, he reflected as he dug deeper. There’d been nary a hitch in the work since he’d started. Perhaps pushing the earth down on himself would would give him pause. But probably not. Each shovel full of dirt was a weight off of his heart. As macabre as he considered the thought, he thought every person should end their life in such a way. This was much better, much more real than passing away on a death bed.
Although what about suffocation? That couldn’t be pleasant. He did enjoy breathing, he really did. He would just deal with it when the time came, confident he could tough it out. After all, it was only for a little while. 41 seconds on average to unconsciousness. He knew. He’d read about it.
He dug a little deeper, a healthy sweat worked up on his arms and in his hair and forehead. I should have brought a towel, he thought, and a pitcher off water to get this dirt off. Who wants to die dirty? It was an honest death sure, a hard working death; but to smell that way for all eternity. He imagined the smell soaked through to one’s bones, so that when his skeleton was excavated years later, the workers would ask for a carbon date… and a can of air freshener.
But going back to pick those things up would be impossible now, he couldn’t have climbed out of his grave if he’d wanted to. It now rose above his ears. He stopped digging and pitched his shovel blade into the earth, stepping back into the cramped space he’d made for himself. The dirt would have to be swept off of the rim of the hole and on top of him, and then a few solid blows to the sides off the hole would need to be made to do the job proper.
He massaged the palm of his right hand as he remembered what had been buried here. The final offering of his back to the earth, the very life that ran through his being. It had been a simple and dirty cut across the palm, preformed with the sharpened blade of that same damn shovel. A shallow cut that dripped blood like a leaky faucet. He was lucky the wound hadn’t infected too badly.
He’d deeply hoped in his dig that he would come across some sign of his gift, an area where the soil was slightly discolored compared to the soil around it, or where a fungus grew in otherwise lifeless soil. If it was there, he hadn’t been able to find it.
Well, one more dig couldn’t hurt.
He plunged his shovel in the earth and tossed the dirt up and out of the hole.
Nothing. There was nothing there. He sighed and decided it was for the best. What did he think was going to be there anyway? That was dumb. HE lifted the shovel over his head to the rim of the hole and prepared to sweep the debris in over him when something got on his sneakers. Something wet. He tried to lift his foot to examine it. Strands of the liquid clung to his shoe like a piece of recently chewed gum on the sidewalk. It was sticky. More and more of the substance filled the bottom of the hole. It was rising, where was it coming from! The stuff had a metallic, reflective sheen, but with the same blotched swirling rainbow that one would see in an oil spill.
Oh shit, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He was just going to float to the top and would have to dig a new hole. He couldn’t even kill himself properly, it was pathetic. But as the amount of the silver fluid flooded the area up towards his knees floating and wry amusement stopped and panic and fears of drowning started. Some people would maybe think it was irrational that he was worried about suffocating in this way and not worried about burying himself alive, but he had his own reasons. He’d never learned to swim, and never been to the ocean or a lake. He felt a connection with dirt and earth, he felt nothing of the sort with whatever this stuff was.
It crept up his body as though it had a mind of its own, a strand reaching further up his body and grasping him and the rest of the liquid following. It rose fast, too fast!
It was much heavier than he thought it would be. As it drug its way up his chest he could feel its weight pulling down on him. He panicked like he hadn’t done the whole time he’d been working and clawed at the walls with his fingertips. He dropped the shovel and it was swallowed hungrily by the ooze in seconds. Thick strands pulled at his arms and he fruitlessly tried to pull himself from the metallic liquid. The deepening pool started to catch up with his body and he soon found himself chest high in the fluid. He didn’t seem to be floating at all, but his feet were still touching the ground. He tried to pull his knees up to his chest and the liquid jumped up to his lower throat as he started sinking. His feet hastily fought through the muck and returned to the floor of the hole. But the slop remained where it was.
It was thick and bitingly cold, and as it rose over his chin he still couldn’t move, didn’t want to move. He didn’t cry out before it rose over his mouth and he couldn’t speak. It rose over his nose and he couldn’t breathe. It rose over his eyes and he could see. It rose over his ears and he couldn’t hear. It rose over his head and he couldn’t come back.
The liquid climbed to the edge of the pit gradually but without pause, on a march to reach the top. But when it finally got there, it didn’t overflow its container. It stopped and stood still, a lake of metal, a perfect circle. It was as though a over the pit there was a seal it couldn’t break, or perhaps more accurately it was afraid of leaving the safety of the hole.
If anyone had been around to watch this process, their eye’s would’ve grown even wider had they witnessed what happened next. The pool started draining. Not by its own accord, the liquid grabbed at the rim of the hole and held fast. These lifeless tentacles fought and stretched till they grew as thin as they could and then snapped and ripped them one by one back into the greater mass. It fell lower and where a head should have been there wasn’t. Where shoulders and arms should have been there weren’t. Where a chest, and stomach, and legs, and knees, and feet should have been, only nothing. Nothing.
He’d disappeared from dates, sports, his home, and the university but never like this. Those times he’d gone down into the earth, now he had left it. It would’ve been a problem to perplex scientists had any been around to see. His body would become a missing person, a ‘John Doe’, in the eyes of the law. His parents would hold out hope, but a phenomenon such as the one that had taken place went far over the heads of even the best law enforcement.
There are some things that go over the heads of all, except children or those who possess a child’s imagination. Such was a place where he had gone now. He would fall from the sky like a meteor, and his impact would change the fate of nations.
