Sprout

back. Or maybe the ambition was smaller: maybe it was just the idea of making a space that was ours and not theirs, no matter how small and dingy it was. Or, who knows, maybe it was the labor itself. What I mean is, the work was sweaty and close. It was impossible not to rub against one another in the cramped quarters. Ty had this way of taking me by the hipbones and guiding me to one side or the other as we squeezed past each other in the entrance. I was shyer, would use my shovel to steer him out of the way as though he were roadkill I didn’t want to touch—but then, as I stepped by, I would pretend to trip and fall against him and wrestle him to the wall.
    There was a lot of wrestling.
    There was a lot of lying next to each other after wrestling.
    There was a lot of lying next to each other.
    I thought of what Ty’d said the first time we’d lain next to each other, about Adam opening his eyes and taking his first breaths, and I remembered how Adam was lonely because he was the only one of his kind. But I didn’t know if I was lonely or not, because I didn’t know if Ty was my kind or not, and after a minute or two, when the silence seemed to float above us like some impossibly huge thing, a Borg cube or the Death Star, I’d get up and grab my shovel, and Ty would get up and grab his shovel, and then we’d squeeze past each other in the narrow entrance to the hole, hips rubbing against each other, chests brushing, hands touching bare skin in ways they could’ve never done in another context, but which was innocent here— clean —precisely because we were so dirty. Because we were digging a hole, and that’s all we were doing.
    When we finally stopped, the hole was ten, maybe twelve feet deep and half as high, narrow enough that our knees touched when we sat cross-legged inside it. We built a fire—it took us an hour to gather the firewood and two to set it alight—and toasted marshmallows and then we never went back again. Sometimes Ty would bring it up, wondering if maybe a hundred years in the future somebody would come across it and find the ashes and the faded plastic marshmallow bag and think it was, “like, historical.” I wondered if maybe the top would fill up with snow during a blizzard and then a deer or a coyote or maybe even an ostrich—we never did see one the whole time—would fall into it and be trapped there, and would slowly starve to death. Ty said maybe we should fill it in, but we never did, and we never went back the following spring either, to see if there was a half-rotted corpse in the bottom. If you believe in Schrödinger’s cat then these possibilities are probly interesting to you, but me, I’m a dog person, and only good with what’s in front of my face.
    I mentioned that we had a dog, right? The German shepherd? Fang? It was a good dog. A smart dog. How do I know it was smart? Because it knew enough to get the hell out of our house, that’s how.
    “Creepy,” I said to Ty, after the marshmallows were gone and the fire’d burned out.
    “What’s creepy?”
    I looked up at the dark walls hemming us in, shovel cuts prominent as whip marks, the sliver of sky visible around the bend of earth.
    “It feels like we’re sitting in our own grave.”
    A stricken expression twisted Ty’s face—the same look he got when he grabbed the Regiers’ electric fence on a dare—and then he got up and walked away.
    You know that expression, “mo’ money, mo’ problems”? Yeah, that’s pretty much crap. I mean, I know Biggie got shot and all, but Ty was living proof that the less you have the harder it is. Compared to him I was rich. Compared to me he was the most miserable boy in the world.
    I followed him up and down the usual hills. Again, I don’t know how he knew where he was going, how we’d never been here before, but there was something different on the other side of this hill. Truth be told, it was just mud. The valley was a little lower here, which made the water table a little higher. The resulting bog—an eighth of an acre at most—was black and churned by two-toed ostrich prints, with here and there standing puddles of water three or four feet in diameter. In a minute I’d kicked my shoes off. The mud was cold and thick like cream cheese just taken out of the refrigerator—but black cream cheese, foul and fecund at the same time. Strong and resistant when you stepped in, tightly gripping as you tried to step out. I made it six steps before I fell onto