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.