In the Dirt
By
Mike Nichols
The boy enters the room and locks in on his mother’s old Kimono where it hangs from the closet door handle, its deep purples and blues. Crimson slashes. The face of a dragon almost obscured by the pattern of colors. She bought it at a shop in Chinatown while visiting San Francisco before he was born.
His vision drifts left across the room. The photo of himself at age three rests at the back of the night stand. A glass of water with the greasy imprint of his mother’s lips on the rim. The bed sheets rumpled. Clothing strewn across the stained carpet.
Bruises, old and new, on his mother’s back, on her rib cage. Marks of defense, her back an offering to save the vital parts of herself. Her still body heaped on the floor. He tries not to see her nakedness, the bright red of her panties a warning. A stop sign. He wants to look away, but he cannot. He wants to run. Run to his friend Trevor’s house to eat homemade cookies. He’d even eat the oatmeal raisin kind right now.
He has no means to express it, but he wants to fly away, to break up into thousands of tiny pieces of himself flung out to settle in the trees and in the grass and in the cracks of the sidewalk.
His mother is not moving and the bruises on her ribs do not rise and fall with her breath because she has no breath at all. He pulls the cover from the foot of the bed and drapes it across her body because he cannot bear to see her naked skin. He smooths back her hair from her face, gently speaking to her, asking her to wake up now. Only just please to wake up now.
And he doesn’t know what to do so he does nothing. He speaks in a whisper to her for a while of things they might do and fun they might have, and then he snuggles in next to her to wait for the next thing.
#
The screen door slams. The boy’s newest father Rick is home. He places the twelve pack of silver beers on the counter and tears it open and takes one out and pulls off the tab. He takes a long drink and puts the twelve pack in the refrigerator. It is just after 10 a.m.
Rick walks into the bedroom, looks at the boy and his mother on the floor. What the fuck are you doing? Get up you stupid bitch.
And the boy is scrambling up from the floor and dodging Rick’s hand, and he is tangled in the bed cover and he is tripping and exposing his mother’s mottled purple and yellow skin. Her vertebrae stand out, a broken and jutting path from nowhere to nothing.
Rick is shaking his mother and hitting her and the boy is crawling backwards until his shoulders hit the wall and then he is in the corner and the wall against his back is the bars to his cage, and he is trying to tell Rick that she will not wake up, and he is trying to ask Rick to stop. His mouth works like that of a drowning fish.
Then Rick is on the floor with them and running his hands through his hair and saying, oh fuck, over and over.
The boy hugs his knees tight. He feels bad for Rick, and he hates himself for it because he knows that Rick has done this to his mother.
Rick is clutching his hair between his fingers and saying, I never meant this. Oh God. I never meant for this.
Then, Kenny. Kenny? You have to help me. I love your mom. You know I do. This was an accident. You know I never meant this. If only she could’ve ever just, just shut the hell up. He crawls across the floor to the boy frozen in the corner and takes him by his shoulders and shakes him.
Look at me. Kenny! Look at me! But the boy cannot look away from his mother. He knows that men will come. They will take his mother away and he will not see her again. So he does not look away from his mother as he jerks his head up and down, nodding for Rick.
Rick is rolling his mother’s body off the bed cover while Kenny watches without seeing from his corner.
Kenny. Grab the blanket and spread it out, there, he points to an empty place on the floor near the closet.
Kenny just stares at his mother’s naked body, the angle Rick has left her in exposing her breasts, one pink areola sagging to rest partially on the brown carpet. His eyes are wide and his breath is quick and shallow. He feels the bile rising to his throat and he gags and Rick is yelling at him, swearing at him, but his limbs won’t move.
Rick crawls across the floor to Kenny and slaps him once across his left cheek, spinning his head around so that in one instant he is looking at the wall, the place where the blue paint is scraped away and the old lime green paint shows through.
Rick is repeating his instruction to spread the bedcover out by the closet and Kenny is crawling now and dragging the bed cover and standing. He flips it in the air and it falls again but it’s too large and too heavy for him. He finds a corner and pulls it straight and he does this with each of the corners. He is accompanied by the sounds of Rick’s shallow breathing and swearing and sometimes barking out a small and humorless laugh.
The blanket is spread and Rick is rolling his mother on to it. Her arms flap over and her breasts sag and settle. Her head thumps on the thin carpet and Kenny can’t look away, but he will not look at the blur of her face.
Rick is making his mother disappear in the bed cover. He flips the bedcover over her and rolls her toward the bed and he tucks the ends over and she is gone. A grotesque mother shape, patterned in flower and vine.
Rick is pleading for him to get the duct tape from the junk drawer and Kenny’s feet move. His legs lift up and drop his feet to the floor and he finds himself in the kitchen. The dirty dishes. The crumbs on the counter. His mother’s spatula set hanging on the wall by the stove.
Then Rick is wrapping the mother shape with the duct tape. He is using up the roll and as this fact dawns on Kenny he is suddenly angry, because what will they do now when they need duct tape?
I have to move the car now, Rick is saying. You know I didn’t mean this, Kenny. You know I loved her. She knew. She knew about my temper. Just like my old man. She knew but she wouldn’t. She just would not. Shut the fuck. Up.
It doesn’t do any good. No good at all for me to go to jail. Won’t bring her back Kenny. No. She wouldn’t want that. She loved me too, you know? She did. All that talk of leaving? Just talk, you see? She never left. She could have, but she never. Besides, if I go away who will take care of you? They’ll put you in kid jail until they find a shitty foster home for you. No. No good for anyone. Won’t bring her back. You can see that can’t you, Kenny?
Kenny stares at a stain in the carpet. He feels his head nodding almost imperceptibly as Rick talks. The stain made by him when a glass of juice slipped from his hands. Another father’s rough hand jerking his thin arm.
Rick takes the keys from the table and walks out the door. Through the screen door he watches Rick back the car onto the lawn and stop a few feet from the front steps.
He turns the key in the trunk and the trunk lid floats open and bounces twice at the top. The screen door slams and Rick is struggling to lift his mother. Help me Kenny. Try and help me. I’ll get under her shoulders and you see if you can’t lift her feet or at least push them along. Come on now. Here we go.
Rick is bending down and Kenny is looking at the screen door and he does not want to touch the flower and vine mother shape on the floor. He knows that he will not.
A jolt of energy jags through him and he is hitting the screen door with both hands and he is running barefoot down the sidewalk. His T.M.N.T. pajamas flap in the breeze of his motion. He thinks this is the right way to Trevor’s house.
Trevor’s Mom will know what to do. He will tell her what happened. Maybe he can still have some milk and her homemade cookies.
He is running and the houses don’t look familiar. He comes to a stop sign and knows that he cannot cross Hurley Street with its four lanes of traffic so now he is running down Hurley Street and thinking what to do if he can’t find Trevor’s house. When he glances down and sees the red of Rafael’s mask on his pajama top he is embarrassed, and he starts to cry.
The black dog hits the chain-link fence snarling and popping its teeth, and he knows that Trevor’s house is around the corner. He turns the corner and sees Trevor’s house but the driveway is empty. They are not home. Then Rick’s car is idling up next to him.
He runs to Trevor’s door and pounds it with his fists. He kicks it and yells Trevor’s name. Then Rick is putting him in the car, and Kenny is letting him.
#
They are driving. They are leaving town. Kenny comes back to himself and Rick is talking, …too much to ask of you. I see that now. You ain’t a bad kid, Kenny. You never were. But this is too much for you to keep to yourself. It’s too hard for a kid your age. I see that now. And I’m sorry, Kenny. Really. So very sorry. I would never hurt your mom on purpose.
Rick stares out the window at the trees, the fields rushing past. Kenny picks at the hem of his pajama top and stares absently at the button that pops open the glove compartment.
So, here’s what we are gonna do. I know a spot. A nice peaceful spot, and we’ll lay your mother there. Wild roses grow in the summer and the breeze rustles the leaves. Your mom would like it there. You’ll see.
Kenny stares out the window at the landscape rushing by, his mind numb and unfocused. He thinks vaguely, magically, that one day soon, not today, but soon he and his mother will go to Annandale Park and he will play on the jungle gym and the swings and she will sit on a wooden bench in the shade and read her book.
Rick turns down a dirt road and follows it for a long while. He pulls into a shallow cutout at the side of the road and turns the engine off. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he lifts his head and stares out the windshield at the trees. Birds twitter in the trees and far off a squirrel chatters.
Listen, Kenny. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We are gonna get your mom out of the trunk. I will dig a hole…
Kenny is yelling, No! We are not going to put her in the dirt! Not in the dirt!
Rick’s slap calms Kenny, drains every bit of fight from him, his thoughts wash out and away like bits of toast crumb from a white plate in the sink. Tears still flow down his face, but he is numb, as if he stands next to a boy who looks like him but to which there is no connection.
You have to calm down, Kenny. Getting worked up will not help. So, we get her out, I make the hole, we’ll cover her up, me and you. Then, I’ll take you back, see if Trevor’s Mom is home by then and you can tell her what happened.
Rick sighs, long drawn and deep. I never wanted this Kenny. Not in a million years I never wanted this.
He is watching Rick struggle to pull the flower and vine mother shape from the trunk. It lands hard on the dirt and long grass of the cutout, its legs propped up against the car’s bumper.
Rick slides a shovel from the floor of the backseat. He scrapes a spot clear of leaves and duff and begins to build a shallow hole. When he is done he calls for Kenny to help him drag and roll the flower and vine mother shape to the hole. Kenny watches himself do this as if from some great distance. Finally, Rick rolls the shape into the hole. He stands, presses his fists into the small of his back and arches his spine.
Now, you say a few words for your mother.
Kenny is too lost to catch hold of a single thing he might say for his mother. A brief constellation explodes across his vision, but he does not feel the shovel strike him in the back of his head. He does not feel his body fall across his Mother’s, one arm above his head as if he’d tried to catch himself. He does not see the bright bloom of blood growing at the base of his skull. He does not feel the dirt break and sift across his back, shovelful by desperate shovelful.
Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho.
Look for his poetry in Underground Voices, Black Rock & Sage, The Literary Nest, and elsewhere. Find more at deadgirldancing.net
By
Mike Nichols
The boy enters the room and locks in on his mother’s old Kimono where it hangs from the closet door handle, its deep purples and blues. Crimson slashes. The face of a dragon almost obscured by the pattern of colors. She bought it at a shop in Chinatown while visiting San Francisco before he was born.
His vision drifts left across the room. The photo of himself at age three rests at the back of the night stand. A glass of water with the greasy imprint of his mother’s lips on the rim. The bed sheets rumpled. Clothing strewn across the stained carpet.
Bruises, old and new, on his mother’s back, on her rib cage. Marks of defense, her back an offering to save the vital parts of herself. Her still body heaped on the floor. He tries not to see her nakedness, the bright red of her panties a warning. A stop sign. He wants to look away, but he cannot. He wants to run. Run to his friend Trevor’s house to eat homemade cookies. He’d even eat the oatmeal raisin kind right now.
He has no means to express it, but he wants to fly away, to break up into thousands of tiny pieces of himself flung out to settle in the trees and in the grass and in the cracks of the sidewalk.
His mother is not moving and the bruises on her ribs do not rise and fall with her breath because she has no breath at all. He pulls the cover from the foot of the bed and drapes it across her body because he cannot bear to see her naked skin. He smooths back her hair from her face, gently speaking to her, asking her to wake up now. Only just please to wake up now.
And he doesn’t know what to do so he does nothing. He speaks in a whisper to her for a while of things they might do and fun they might have, and then he snuggles in next to her to wait for the next thing.
#
The screen door slams. The boy’s newest father Rick is home. He places the twelve pack of silver beers on the counter and tears it open and takes one out and pulls off the tab. He takes a long drink and puts the twelve pack in the refrigerator. It is just after 10 a.m.
Rick walks into the bedroom, looks at the boy and his mother on the floor. What the fuck are you doing? Get up you stupid bitch.
And the boy is scrambling up from the floor and dodging Rick’s hand, and he is tangled in the bed cover and he is tripping and exposing his mother’s mottled purple and yellow skin. Her vertebrae stand out, a broken and jutting path from nowhere to nothing.
Rick is shaking his mother and hitting her and the boy is crawling backwards until his shoulders hit the wall and then he is in the corner and the wall against his back is the bars to his cage, and he is trying to tell Rick that she will not wake up, and he is trying to ask Rick to stop. His mouth works like that of a drowning fish.
Then Rick is on the floor with them and running his hands through his hair and saying, oh fuck, over and over.
The boy hugs his knees tight. He feels bad for Rick, and he hates himself for it because he knows that Rick has done this to his mother.
Rick is clutching his hair between his fingers and saying, I never meant this. Oh God. I never meant for this.
Then, Kenny. Kenny? You have to help me. I love your mom. You know I do. This was an accident. You know I never meant this. If only she could’ve ever just, just shut the hell up. He crawls across the floor to the boy frozen in the corner and takes him by his shoulders and shakes him.
Look at me. Kenny! Look at me! But the boy cannot look away from his mother. He knows that men will come. They will take his mother away and he will not see her again. So he does not look away from his mother as he jerks his head up and down, nodding for Rick.
Rick is rolling his mother’s body off the bed cover while Kenny watches without seeing from his corner.
Kenny. Grab the blanket and spread it out, there, he points to an empty place on the floor near the closet.
Kenny just stares at his mother’s naked body, the angle Rick has left her in exposing her breasts, one pink areola sagging to rest partially on the brown carpet. His eyes are wide and his breath is quick and shallow. He feels the bile rising to his throat and he gags and Rick is yelling at him, swearing at him, but his limbs won’t move.
Rick crawls across the floor to Kenny and slaps him once across his left cheek, spinning his head around so that in one instant he is looking at the wall, the place where the blue paint is scraped away and the old lime green paint shows through.
Rick is repeating his instruction to spread the bedcover out by the closet and Kenny is crawling now and dragging the bed cover and standing. He flips it in the air and it falls again but it’s too large and too heavy for him. He finds a corner and pulls it straight and he does this with each of the corners. He is accompanied by the sounds of Rick’s shallow breathing and swearing and sometimes barking out a small and humorless laugh.
The blanket is spread and Rick is rolling his mother on to it. Her arms flap over and her breasts sag and settle. Her head thumps on the thin carpet and Kenny can’t look away, but he will not look at the blur of her face.
Rick is making his mother disappear in the bed cover. He flips the bedcover over her and rolls her toward the bed and he tucks the ends over and she is gone. A grotesque mother shape, patterned in flower and vine.
Rick is pleading for him to get the duct tape from the junk drawer and Kenny’s feet move. His legs lift up and drop his feet to the floor and he finds himself in the kitchen. The dirty dishes. The crumbs on the counter. His mother’s spatula set hanging on the wall by the stove.
Then Rick is wrapping the mother shape with the duct tape. He is using up the roll and as this fact dawns on Kenny he is suddenly angry, because what will they do now when they need duct tape?
I have to move the car now, Rick is saying. You know I didn’t mean this, Kenny. You know I loved her. She knew. She knew about my temper. Just like my old man. She knew but she wouldn’t. She just would not. Shut the fuck. Up.
It doesn’t do any good. No good at all for me to go to jail. Won’t bring her back Kenny. No. She wouldn’t want that. She loved me too, you know? She did. All that talk of leaving? Just talk, you see? She never left. She could have, but she never. Besides, if I go away who will take care of you? They’ll put you in kid jail until they find a shitty foster home for you. No. No good for anyone. Won’t bring her back. You can see that can’t you, Kenny?
Kenny stares at a stain in the carpet. He feels his head nodding almost imperceptibly as Rick talks. The stain made by him when a glass of juice slipped from his hands. Another father’s rough hand jerking his thin arm.
Rick takes the keys from the table and walks out the door. Through the screen door he watches Rick back the car onto the lawn and stop a few feet from the front steps.
He turns the key in the trunk and the trunk lid floats open and bounces twice at the top. The screen door slams and Rick is struggling to lift his mother. Help me Kenny. Try and help me. I’ll get under her shoulders and you see if you can’t lift her feet or at least push them along. Come on now. Here we go.
Rick is bending down and Kenny is looking at the screen door and he does not want to touch the flower and vine mother shape on the floor. He knows that he will not.
A jolt of energy jags through him and he is hitting the screen door with both hands and he is running barefoot down the sidewalk. His T.M.N.T. pajamas flap in the breeze of his motion. He thinks this is the right way to Trevor’s house.
Trevor’s Mom will know what to do. He will tell her what happened. Maybe he can still have some milk and her homemade cookies.
He is running and the houses don’t look familiar. He comes to a stop sign and knows that he cannot cross Hurley Street with its four lanes of traffic so now he is running down Hurley Street and thinking what to do if he can’t find Trevor’s house. When he glances down and sees the red of Rafael’s mask on his pajama top he is embarrassed, and he starts to cry.
The black dog hits the chain-link fence snarling and popping its teeth, and he knows that Trevor’s house is around the corner. He turns the corner and sees Trevor’s house but the driveway is empty. They are not home. Then Rick’s car is idling up next to him.
He runs to Trevor’s door and pounds it with his fists. He kicks it and yells Trevor’s name. Then Rick is putting him in the car, and Kenny is letting him.
#
They are driving. They are leaving town. Kenny comes back to himself and Rick is talking, …too much to ask of you. I see that now. You ain’t a bad kid, Kenny. You never were. But this is too much for you to keep to yourself. It’s too hard for a kid your age. I see that now. And I’m sorry, Kenny. Really. So very sorry. I would never hurt your mom on purpose.
Rick stares out the window at the trees, the fields rushing past. Kenny picks at the hem of his pajama top and stares absently at the button that pops open the glove compartment.
So, here’s what we are gonna do. I know a spot. A nice peaceful spot, and we’ll lay your mother there. Wild roses grow in the summer and the breeze rustles the leaves. Your mom would like it there. You’ll see.
Kenny stares out the window at the landscape rushing by, his mind numb and unfocused. He thinks vaguely, magically, that one day soon, not today, but soon he and his mother will go to Annandale Park and he will play on the jungle gym and the swings and she will sit on a wooden bench in the shade and read her book.
Rick turns down a dirt road and follows it for a long while. He pulls into a shallow cutout at the side of the road and turns the engine off. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he lifts his head and stares out the windshield at the trees. Birds twitter in the trees and far off a squirrel chatters.
Listen, Kenny. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We are gonna get your mom out of the trunk. I will dig a hole…
Kenny is yelling, No! We are not going to put her in the dirt! Not in the dirt!
Rick’s slap calms Kenny, drains every bit of fight from him, his thoughts wash out and away like bits of toast crumb from a white plate in the sink. Tears still flow down his face, but he is numb, as if he stands next to a boy who looks like him but to which there is no connection.
You have to calm down, Kenny. Getting worked up will not help. So, we get her out, I make the hole, we’ll cover her up, me and you. Then, I’ll take you back, see if Trevor’s Mom is home by then and you can tell her what happened.
Rick sighs, long drawn and deep. I never wanted this Kenny. Not in a million years I never wanted this.
He is watching Rick struggle to pull the flower and vine mother shape from the trunk. It lands hard on the dirt and long grass of the cutout, its legs propped up against the car’s bumper.
Rick slides a shovel from the floor of the backseat. He scrapes a spot clear of leaves and duff and begins to build a shallow hole. When he is done he calls for Kenny to help him drag and roll the flower and vine mother shape to the hole. Kenny watches himself do this as if from some great distance. Finally, Rick rolls the shape into the hole. He stands, presses his fists into the small of his back and arches his spine.
Now, you say a few words for your mother.
Kenny is too lost to catch hold of a single thing he might say for his mother. A brief constellation explodes across his vision, but he does not feel the shovel strike him in the back of his head. He does not feel his body fall across his Mother’s, one arm above his head as if he’d tried to catch himself. He does not see the bright bloom of blood growing at the base of his skull. He does not feel the dirt break and sift across his back, shovelful by desperate shovelful.
Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho.
Look for his poetry in Underground Voices, Black Rock & Sage, The Literary Nest, and elsewhere. Find more at deadgirldancing.net
