Young Writers Society

"The world is shovelfuls of dirt," he thinks, bringing a cigarette to his lips. "Lie back on the cold earth. Don't you fall asleep. Are you sleeping? You're sleeping, aren't you? Are you ever going to sit up again? Bury yourself one shovelful at a time."

He sits in the middle of the shack, mud smudged on the floor and something left behind by a mouse in the corner. He sits and inhales the dust, the smell of the place where the tobacco has never left. Someone smoked pipe tobacco here once, long ago, smoked enough so that the smell still seeps out of the wood on damp days when the sun hasn't shone brightly enough, when the rain drips through the hole in the corner of the roof and forms a puddle of moss and brown water and broken things on the floor.

He thinks of food. Hot food. Spoonfuls of hot food going down the back of his throat. It is food that someone has taken a lot of time making; he can taste the effort that went into it. The taste lingers in his mouth long after he imagines swallowing it, a warm brown taste of good things and spices and perhaps something like oregano and root beer mixed together, brewed into a thick something that warms his belly on the way down. He used to have food that was that way. Now he eats things that come out of crinkling silver packages because that is what he can afford.

"No one will be able to say they've seen me. Not that you'd ask, dad. But you might ask, I think; your knives might get hungry. Because they might get hungry for the skin over my ribs. And you might get hungry, too, hungry for the one thing you like to do when it is night and the sirens are out, quiet and loud all at once.

"There was a fear like a white wire of pain worming itself around in my head. Nothing mattered but the door. And then there was you. It was you and it was not you. It was not the you that was there in the mornings, sullen and distant, carving the juice out of a grapefruit and pretending I wasn't there; it was the you that was alive and tense, a you that sunk your hands into the things I hated about myself and built a nest there, laughing, saying, 'Isn't this fun, Jimmy, oh my, isn't it just?'

"But it was anything but fun. Because there is nothing that is fun but the cigarettes. Everyone says they're going to kill you, but they forget about all of the things that are much worse. The smoke kills you over time, but so do words. So do the people who stare at you from their cars acting like you're a scab on the face of the planet. Fast food kills you, being cold kills you, the flu kills you, fevers kill you. Even the man who prints the newspaper kills you because he lets you know about other people who have been killed. And the parts of you that wanted to believe that there were people out there who wanted to keep you safe dies, perishes because of him.

"Even the man on the corner will do bad things to you if you don't watch out, the one who watches you when you get on the bus, the one who's waiting for you when you get back. Everything is killing you. Even you. And you can't do a thing to stop it."

Another drag, another puff, a resettling of muscles. One hand moves to his ribs, touches gently, moves way. He resumes thinking to himself.

"Lamplight, shining bright,

keep me in your soul tonight.

I promise you we'll head on home

and see the world, the lamplight gone."

The lullaby. His mother's voice wavering up and down like water swirling in a cup. The faster her voice wavered, the worse he knew it was getting. Four years since the last time she sang it. She sang it to him even when he was twelve because both of them needed it. Because his father was starting to get worse and his mother was starting to notice and he was wondering if he was going to hell because he thought maybe he liked boys, but then, he'd kissed a girl and he'd liked it, so what did that mean? Someone called him gay because his shirt was too tight - he'd grown over the summer and didn't have money for new ones - and he was confused and a little scared because he wasn't sure whether the name caller had been right or not.

"Lamplight, kiss me, hold me close.

The sun is gone and no one knows.

For night is only secrecy

and you've told your secrets to me."

He sings the words softly to himself, beneath his breath, trying to see if any of his mother's voice is inside of his voice, if there is any of her left; he catches maybe a syllable of his mother in the third line, but it's gone in an instant, replaced by his father's voice thrumming in his head.

"Don't you dare move. Don't you ever move again. Your mother moved. Don't you remember where she ended up? You'll end up there, I know it's true, just stay still. Don't stay still. You're being too quiet. You're being too loud. You're simply being. Is there anything in this world that you can do right, you damned boy? You can't even get it right, not even this, and it's supposed to be fun. Your mother never knew it was fun, either..."

He shakes his head vehemently, shakes the thoughts out of his mind. They tumble from his ears. He begins singing the lullaby again, washing his mind clean with thoughts of his mother.

"Lamplight, lovely, love you more.

I promise we will find a door.

Our love is here, the shades are drawn.

I promise you we'll see the dawn. "

The lullaby is one of the things he misses most about her. He misses it so much that he's written his own, has written it with cigarettes. The first one made him cough. The second one made him sneeze. The third one was heaven. He sucks them down because at last there is something in the world that belongs to him, even if it does turn into smoke and waft in misty cirliques up the hole in the corner of the roof, even if he does have to find someone to buy them from at school because he's only sixteen and can't buy them for himself. Her lullaby used to smooth all of the empty places inside of him. The smoke serves the same purpose.

"Lamplight, lovely, I am here.

The past is gone, the future near.

But though the world may see us part,

I promise you, you're in my heart."

He takes another puff of the cigarette, rubs it out on the floor, sits back, glances around the room. His father might find him here. Will his father want to find him? And if his father does want to, will it be because his knives are hungry or because he loves him?

"Does he love me? I think he thinks he loves me. He loves me with the knife. He loves me by paying me attention, loves me when my bones collide with steel, loves me when I wash my own sheets in the morning. And it is not love at all, but he thinks it is. So maybe it is love to him. But it is not love to me. If it is love to him and not me, then who the hell is right?"

He shifts his weight - his hand flickers to his ribcage again - and resettles himself. His fingertip brushes against moss. Curious, he brings it to his lips.

"This is the taste of moss. The moss eats things. The moss is a plant that slowly creeps over the entire world and wraps it in a soft green blanket. Keeps the world warm. And bugs live there, inside of it, in soft green homes. Do any of the fathers have knives? Do any of the sons eat things from foil packages? Do praying mantises creep out to shacks in the middle of the night after the fathers with the knives have gone to sleep and they've eaten the things from the foil packages and sit up smoking cigarettes and pretending that nothing has ever mattered, that the world is shovelfuls of dirt?

"What if everyone has pictures on their ribcages? What if everyone has a mother beneath the shovelfuls? What if everyone has someone like her to remember like you do; you remember her in a way that snaps you in half and your spine is obliterated and you want nothing more in all the world but to love someone, and not the way your father loves you, but the way your mother loved you, the way she wanted the best for you, the way she apologized to you for not getting you away from him fast enough, the way the pictures your father drew on her were inside of her and not outside of her the way they are on you?"

He leans back against the wall; his hand moves absently to his shirt, burrowing beneath it, gently brushing the lines cris-crossing his skin. His father's lines, the pictures his father draws with his knife. Each line is a scream; each scar is a swear.

"This is my father's love. And the lullaby is my mother's love. And I am all out of cigarettes."

So he thinks. He settles back against the wall and continues thinking to himself, continues talking.

"The world is shovelfuls of dirt. Lie back on the cold earth. Don't you fall asleep. Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping yet? Are you ever going to sit up again? Bury yourself one shovelful at a time.

"You are the person sleeping in the ground and the person holding the shovel. A part of you only wants to be one and part of you knows you're both. And you hate yourself for being both, but you're too afraid to just be one.

The world is shovelfuls of dirt. Lie back. Listen to the clunks hitting the ceiling and know that you are in a place you can't get out of. You are the man holding the shovel and you are the man in the coffin. All of the world is a graveyard and that is why everyone is so sad all of the time, killing each other and cutting each other and screaming, because we are living on top of the same thing we have thrown on top of the people we love most. We know that sooner or later, we're going to have stop laying in a grave or digging a grave and choose one, and that scares the shit out of us. We know that sooner or later, the shovelfuls of dirt are going to catch up with us.

His fingers touch a sensitive place. He flinches and looks down, inspects his scarlet fingertips.

"Someday maybe I will look down and not see my father's stories anymore."

He imagines shovelfuls of dirt covering his father's stories, imagines soil covering skin, imagines his mother, singing her lullaby in her trembling voice:

But though the world may see us part,

I promise you you're in my heart.

He stands to leave the shack.

"All the stands between us, Mom," he whispers, "are shovelfuls of dirt."