What Happens to Little Girls

“Listen to me, and stay away from that damn hole,” Gramma says. “Cause if you don’t, it’ll eat you up just like it did my daughter.”

She doesn’t have her teeth in, and she mushes her words like Malt-O-Meal, but she’s lying; the hole is new, and she’s just trying to make me behave.

It started as a wet burp of mud a week ago, something you could put your finger into and feel the suck of the earth like it was alive. Then it grew. The size of a half-dollar. A cereal bowl. A beach ball. An eight-year-old child.

“You never had a daughter, Gramma, just Daddy and Uncle Jon.”

“Shows how much you know.” She waves her hand at me, flat and white like a spatula. That hand stings when it hits, when it catches me after lying or stealing change from her purse or feeding ham slices to the neighbor’s rottweiler through the fence. That hand used to catch Daddy too, the back of it smacking him in the mouth so many times when he was little his left front tooth was chipped into a ragged crescent, a piece of his smile always eclipsed by Gramma’s hand. He smiled when he left me here, but the dark space in his tooth reminded me that some things keep chasing you even after you get away.

In the afternoon, when the sun gets too hot and Gramma takes her nap, fan on, shoes off, facedown on the coverlet like she’s part of the log ride at Wild Waves, the hole calls to me. The neighbor’s sprinkler squeaks and some yahoo drives by the house with his radio turned all the way up, but inside, Gramma’s still snoring.

I crouch. At first, it’s just my hand in the cool silt, sludge that tugs the webbing of my fingers, and I reach in deeper, past the wrist, so slow and soft, to the elbow. But the hole doesn’t end, it’s not blocked by rocks or hard soil, and I begin to think that if I climbed all the way in, it would cover me completely, calm and gentle, toes to head, in a soft, wet cocoon of silence.

But when I’ve reached in up to my shoulder, cheek resting on the viscous surface, hand straining further, splayed deep inside the pleasant mud, something in the hole grabs back. Something that doesn’t give up. Something with fingers and nails just like mine.

Have you ever lost a shoe in wet sand? Or stepped in a too-deep puddle along some potholed road? Have you felt the way the liquid ground holds on? Pulls back harder the more you struggle? The way your joints might pop, your bones might break if you fight?

Shoulder-deep in the mudhole, I hear Gramma yell, “What the hell is all that noise?” And it’s me, screaming at the top of my lungs, the neighbor’s rottweiler barking, threatening to come right through the place in the fence with the rotten boards, and inside the earth, some long-dead little girl won’t let me go.

I’m so scared, I wet my pants, just a little from the struggle, sure I’m breaking my body apart as I pull my arm from the suctioning mire. Then I run like hell, smear the back door with brown, leave a dripping trail to the bathroom where I cry and cry because I can’t tell what’s scarier, the thing in the hole or Gramma lumbering down the stairs. I wash my arm in the shower, forcing the grit down the drain with my fingertips, and yell, “Nothing, Gramma!” I know the minute she sees me it’ll be over, and part of me wants it to be over. Maybe it would be better to live in a hole than Gramma’s house. Maybe her daughter thought so too.

When I give up and go out, my T-shirt stained and my eyes red and the whole bathroom stinking of dirt, she knows. And she grabs me by the back of the neck, torquing my already-sore shoulder, and marches me right back out there so I can learn what happens to little girls who don’t listen.

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