This story came out of a writing prompt and a news article I read a while back. I've posted it before, but I've wrote a little more and changed somethings. I've mostly been working on Jaisa's story but I can't let this one go. I love Jaisa and I know where her story is going so I'm running with that now, but I'm super excited to get some ideas and roll with Branko soon.
Damn! A
blister the size of a peach pit splits open on my palm. I drop the shovel and
stare down at the ripped flesh. It's kind of oozy. I look up, out of the hole
at the night sky. The moon glows orange against the black. Wait, what? Out of a hole? Branko,
what the hell are you doing in a hole? I ask myself.
Yep, the shovel, the dirt, the digging.
Digging a hole. Why am I digging a hole?
Dirt covers my boots and dust streaks
my jeans and flannel shirt, which is ripped across the front like a werewolf
clawed my chest. Blood. My side is bleeding. How am I going to get out of this hole? The sides are just
taller than my head. Where is all of the
dirt I got out of this bad boy? What
if it caves in on me?
My chest tightens. Breathing hard. Eyes
bouncing to the ground, underground all around me, up, up and out, only able to
see sky, where is the ground?
I'm in the ground.
I grab a root and try to hoist myself
up. Pulling, scrambling out, grasping for grass, lugging body out of hole. Out,
out of the ground!
I lie on my stomach, feet dangling over
the mouth of the hole, left cheek resting on the grass. Breathing, sweating,
blister oozing. When I look up, holes. All I see are holes.
I can't see far. The
tangerine moon is the only light, but I know in the blackness are more holes.
Holes like the one I just crawled from. Six feet wide, six feet deep. If I
reach to the right, I can stick my arm in a hole. If I reach to the left, same
thing. A cloud drifts over the moon, leaving me in complete darkness.
I wake with the
sun and remember what I’m doing, the confusion of the night before lifts with
the return of day. At first I how often I forget where I am scared me. Now,
sometimes I think it’s a blessing to forget.
I had understood
that they were going to do it. Knock me out, take part of my liver, stitch me
up and wake me when it was over. I knew it would be painful. But I was supposed
to get $40,000 for it. Do you know how much money that is? How much food that
can buy? Heat, water, food. If I just did it, then we’d be set. With Dad dead,
I’m the one to do it. I am the man. Take care of your mother he had said. I
can’t make enough at the meat factory and they just laid Mom off. They probably
kept me since they can pay me less. Woo for child labor.
I
just thought the liver people would snip off the part they wanted and pay me
and send me home. Now, here I am with less than half a liver, digging holes for
crazy people. Murders, probably. I look over at my shovel from where I’m lying
in the narrow strip between two holes. Would
one of these holes be my grave? What’ll happen when I get to the edge of the
clearing? He’d said dig six foot by six foot spaced three feet apart until
the entire field was full. The field is barely the size of a soccer pitch. What
happens when I’m done?
I
stand and immediately fall back on my ass, leaning into the nearest hole,
barfing. I put my fingers on the scar. How
long has it been? I sit up and count the holes. Thirty-three. Thirty-three
holes times one hole a day plus the three weeks (give or take) I was at the
chop shop, “the hospital” where they took out sixty percent of my liver and
didn’t pay me a dime or send me home. That means fifty-four days. At least.
Fifty-four days I’ve been gone and Mom has been without money. Sixty-three days
after my seventeenth birthday. If it really was three weeks before they brought
me to the holes.
I’d gone into the
surgery without Mom knowing six days after my birthday. Six days after she
cried because we couldn’t afford dinner and a cake and a gift and all we had
was canned corn, bread and butter and a beautiful chocolate torte without the
nuts—too expensive—for my birthday.
I
grab my shovel and thrust the tip into the ground, pulling myself up on the
handle, supporting myself to stand. I went to Kosovo to sell my liver piece,
but I’ve no idea where I am now. I could be in any field in any country. The
air is crisp, fall is coming, and it smells like dirt, soil. Holes. My gnarly,
black hair flops to the top of my ears, dirt lives under my fingernails and
probably in every crevice of my body and bones jut out everywhere, stretching
my skin. No one back home in Serbia would recognize me now without my usual
buzz cut, scrubbed raw skin and muscles. Verica. Verica would still recognize
me. All she ever has to do is look in my eyes and she knows everything that’s
inside me.
I
start digging.
Someone is
watching. There is always someone watching. I tried to run twice and was
whipped like a racehorse in a close race: swift, hard and with a mean sense of
urgency. Breakfast comes when the sun looms over the trees.
I had kissed Mom
goodbye when I left that last morning. “I love you,” I told her. “See you in a
few days.” I told them the owners of our factory in Krusevac were sending a
group to start a new factory in Aleksinac, but I really jumped a train to Pristina,
Kosovo. I told her I’d be gone for two weeks.
The shovel is
heavy today. The dirt is heavy today. Sometimes I think this is getting easier.
Today I feel each mound of dirt weighing down all the muscles in my body. Every
movement is crushing and slow, like I’m trying to move in a dream.
I didn’t tell Verica
I was leaving. I knew if I told her
anything, she’d know I was lying. She’s funny like that. I may have known her
longer than I’ve known anyone other than my parents, but I can’t tell if she
loves me or hates me. She probably knows what I had for dinner and how many
times I brush teeth every day of the week.
“Branislav Zupan, I
see you waiting for me under that tree. Don’t act like I can’t walk myself
home. I’m a big girl and I know you aren’t just passing by,” she used to say
when I first started at the factory and she still got to go to school.
I hate when people
call me by my given name—Branislav. No thank you. It’s Branko.
A worm wiggles in
the shovel full of dirt I just scooped up. Actually, I notice, I cut him in
half. How does that work? That you can cut a worm in half and both halves go on
living?
Verica and I grew
up in the same apartment building, our moms took turns watching us based on
their shifts at the factory. We went to school together until I had to drop
out. Right before I left to sell the piece of my liver, Verica had had to drop
out too to go to work because her brother, Vuk, went to jail.
“I can’t go work
there, Branko.” She cried the night before her first day while we sat on the
stoop of our apartment building. The red brick building sagged with the
depression of all who lived there. The outside smelled like piss and burnt
cheese, but when I was with Verica all I could smell was her—sweet, sweet
honey. Honey like her hair in the sun, reaching all the way down her back.
Honey like the smoothness of her legs when she wore shorts or skirts that waved
around her knees. Honey like the sweetness of her voice when she called through
my window to come over.
I didn’t know how
to respond. I knew she didn’t want to work in the factory. I didn’t want to
work there either, but what choice did we have? I took her hand in mine and
tried to wipe the tears from under her dark brown eyes.
She pulled her
hand away and stood up, looking down the street. Away from our home, away from
me. “I just want to stay in school, you know? Maybe if I can stay there, I can
learn something. Something that will take me away from here.” She leaned
against the railing to the apartment stairs with her back to me.
“Where else can
you go? Your parents need you,” I said. I
need you, I thought.
“You’re too loyal,
Branko. Sometimes I wish you’d just be selfish and do something for your self.
Just once. Don’t be so damn responsible.” She turned and walked up the stoop
into the apartment building and away from me.
I walked her to
and from the factory every day if I wasn’t working. I wonder what she thought
when I didn’t show up.
The sun is up over
the trees and Lugnuts lumbers over with bread. I mean breakfast. It’s always
bread. Bread and water in a canteen, both of which he chucks at me like I’m
waiting for a pitch. I don’t Lugnuts’s real name. He just looks like he’s a few
lugnuts short of, well, anything that might work properly.
“Hey! What’s going
to happen when I dig up this whole lot?” I ask, waving my hands toward the
remaining empty expanse of the field. The first few days I asked question after
question, always answered by the same blank stare. After a week I gave up.
Lugnuts looks at
me like I asked him to find the square root of pi, shrugs and weaves his way
back through the minefield of holes to the tree line.
Some other guy is
the one who told me to dig that first morning I woke up out here. He had on a
ski mask, black jeans and a black shirt. His voice was deep but not
distinctive. He wasn’t very tall or very fat. Nothing about him could help me
identify him when, if, I escape. I haven’t seen him since that first day.
I woke to someone
kicking my foot. The world was spinning and the sun was so bright! How long had
it been since I’d seen the sun? How long had it been since my surgery? My whole
body ached. Ski Mask threw the shovel down beside me and said dig. “Dig the holes
six feet around and six feet deep. Measure them one foot above your shovel
height. Space them three feet apart.”
I don’t think I
even responded. I just laid there, gaping at him. I touched my side, my scar
from the surgery. I didn’t think I could even stand up let alone dig a freaking
hole. Then crack!
Lugnuts snapped a
whip at me, catching my bicep, tearing at the skin under my shirt sleeve. I
stared down at my arm, unable to believe the pain and pop! He whipped me again,
this time on my thigh.
“Dig or this time
it’s your face,” Ski Mask told me.
I used the shovel
to steady myself while standing.
“Dig,” Ski Mask
said.
I plunged the tip
of the shovel into the grass, using my full body weight to drive the blade
down.
Ski Mask nodded
and he and Lugnuts walked back into the trees.
