Short Story: "The Grave"

"The Grave" -- I do not know what year it is or how old I am, but I do know that I am not quite old enough to care too much about those numbers just yet. I am in my grandmother's yard and she is doing yardwork and gardening in her straw sunhat and ordering me around, telling me to complete various gardening tasks so that she can pay me for pretending to work. As we toil around the yard she tells me the various names of the plants and shrubs and trees and tells me what they require to maintain. Mulch the marigolds by the concrete walkway leading to the front door. Compost of banana peels and coffee grounds and egg shells to moil the earth for the quince tree out by the fence beside the front garden. Fresh soil and water for the hyacinth and peonies beside the greenhouse attached to the house. Pruning sheers and extra water for the hydrangeas and hedge clippers for limbs on the encroaching magnolia. Carry the fallen limbs and brush to the big pile of brush and debris out in the field beyond the fencing around the yard's perimeter. She tells me how long the plants have been there and their various and sundry histories and needs. The bumble of a small Cessna plane overhead pierces the otherwise quiescent country air.

When we get to the rhododendrons in the front yard by the oak grove, we come across a diminutive cross and stake with a necklace hanging from it nestled behind the rhodies and beneath the old hoary oaks. We pause for a moment and she tells me that it is the grave of my uncle who was killed in a motorcycle accident just down the road on the street connected to the property my family lives on, a few years before I was born. When my grandmother says, "That's where we buried my son, your uncle, Chris," she says it with a forlorn heavy sigh as if saying it once more will finally somehow make it not true. In winter the bare and skeletal oak limbs against the gloom of lavender twilight beckon like gaunt emissaries to somewhere forbidden, turning every house into a haunted house. In springtime the fresh green oak leaves make a hush of whispers in the warm spring breeze and cool rains, like a quiet ocean.

It is 1997 in the late summer, several years later. A few hundred yards from the grave beneath the oaks, we crash the wooden car with broken brakes and no motor over and over again on the hill leading to my grandparents' house. We run it down the hill and into the tunnel of underbrush beneath some fir trees along the gravel road in a choreographed loop of pretend destruction. My friend, standing on the back of the wooden car like the driver of a horse and buggy, ducks down as we go into the woody undergrowth. The brush and grass slow the car to a stop. When we tire of that loop, we push the car back up to the top of the hill and then careen down the rest of the hill and turn into the driveway leading to the house where I live, coasting at no more than ten miles an hour the whole time.

The last time we ever coast that wooden car down the hill, the last time I ever get behind the wheel of the wooden car that my father made for me, my mother happens to be backing her car out of the driveway leading to the house. She backs her car over the culvert just as we round the blind corner leading up the hill to my grandparents' house. When I see her turn the car into the main driveway and back it up the hill, I start the mental calculus of navigating the wooden car hidebound by inertia around the very real car that is now coming at me faster than I have time to react, but by now it is far too late to prevent what is about to happen from happening. In the fleeting seconds before impact my mind tries desperately and feebly to fathom the reality of the wicked combination of force and mass and acceleration and gravity that is about befall my body, but my mind comes up short.

When the wooden car hits my mother's mud-brown Buick with a snap and a loud crack, my right foot smashes against the car's rear bumper. My foot bends back until my shoe's toe touches my shin. My leg breaks with a dull muffled crunch, like paper crumpling. The force of the impact breaks both my tibia and fibula bones, right above my ankle. I hear myself scream louder than I have ever screamed, a noise so loud and thoroughly bizarre that it sounds as if it is coming from somewhere other than my body. My vision starts to turn white almost instantly. I feel myself falling forward and down in a wild spin, even though inertia's jawless toothy grin bites down upon my body, stopping everything in a frozen instant. The motion of the world around me seems to die. I feel the plangent thud of my heartbeat drumming against my chest, suddenly so much louder and faster than I ever thought possible. I hear the deafening sonorous hiss of rushing water in my head, but no water comes.

My mother gets out of her car and runs to the back, saying, "Ohmygod, ohmygod!" She yanks and tugs futilely at my limp shrieking body as she tries to pull me free from the frame of the small wooden car jammed under the back of her car, the whole time saying over and over, "Ohmygod, hold on, ohmygod!" She manages to pull my leg free from under the car. My foot dangles and flops limply to-and-fro. My mother realizes that she will not be able to lift me free of the wreck, saying, "Ohmygod, ohmygod, I have to get Erik, hold on. I have to get Erik." She leaves to get my father. My friend starts to pace frantically back and forth while quickly staring at my damaged leg and wincing and then looking away just as quickly. My leg starts to turn from blue to purple to black, swelling to half again its size.

As the empty white of syncope and shock begins to annihilate my perception, reality starts to dilate and stretch into an immeasurable distance, like an accordion of suffering. I hear music that is not really music. Every scintilla of knowledge regarding the whereness of my being leaves my mind, as air might escape a dying room into the fatal refuge of vacuum space. I am nowhere. The world is pain, and I am its exposed nerve.

My body belongs to the music of agony, and I feel its threnodies resonating within me in cascades and swells of pain expanding and contracting through my blood with every beat of my heart.

My father lifts my still-limp shrieking body out of wooden car's frame and puts it in the back of the car and drives the car down toward the house and then gets out of the car and lifts my body out of the backseat and carries it the rest of the way to the house. In that impossible distance between the scene of the wreck and the house, I begin to sob uncontrollably, saying, "It hurts, It's cold," involuntarily, puppeted by the pain swirling through my blood in a whorl of dissolution. As he carries me in his arms, I see my body pass under the limpid blue sky and the lee of firs swaying gently in the warm summer air. My dimming awareness mistakes the susurration of the firs in the wind for a river in the distance. When my father gets inside the house, he sets my shivering body down on the couch. Nothing now stands in the way to stop my nervous system from its precipitous descent into the maelstrom of shock.

As severe shock sets in, my every cell burns in a cold chemical fire. The pain becomes so profound that I stop crying out about it, as if the pain has erased itself. I mewl, "It's cold, It's cold," again and again, until the words become the only words that I know or have ever known. My teeth chatter so hard my jaw hurts. My mother puts a hot water bottle on my chest, but my body just starts shaking harder in response to the heat. Large black circles form around my eyes from the chemicals seething in my veins. My leg turns violent black, swelling to a point where it looks as if it might burst open at any moment, an almost spheroidal bulge forming around the break. My friend keeps walking in and out of the room to stare at my leg with a look of wide-eyed stupefaction somewhere between grim fascination and abject horror.

I hear my parents arguing in the other room about whether to take me to the hospital in the city nine miles away or to the other hospital in the city sixteen miles away. In this moment, both places in my mind feel a million miles away and across a vast sea of indifference.

In the back of the mud-brown Buick on the way to the hospital sixteen miles away, I get quieter and quieter with each passing mile, muttering then whimpering then whispering, "It's cold," over and over again, "It's cold."

When we arrive at the hospital, the doctors and nurses tell me that I have huge dark circles around my eyes because the shock is so bad. As the afternoon fades to dusk then night, so too does my vision and apprehension of the world around me. Everything begins to glow in the cold geometry of phosphorescence, every shadowless angle suffused in aseptic light. My mind swims tangled and anchorless in entropy. People's faces glitter when the caustic light bounces off them, and when they move they look like puppets in a show. They tell me that they are going to give me something for the pain so they can set my leg and wrap it in a cast. They put a nitrous-oxide mask on my face and tell me to breathe deeply. As soon as I start breathing the narcotizing gas, the bright gauzy glow stuck to everything dims and the lights seem to fade. I see a world of endless rooms from down a long corridor, and sounds grow hollow and distant.

I see tracers and sparks rising and falling within waves of shadows as slowly the room dissolves. Phosphenes flit and dance before my eyes as do dreams of pictures of memories. I do not know if my eyes are open or closed anymore. The universe pours into my head all at once every shred of every feeling I have ever known. I am in the yard under the oaks. My grandmother speaks to me by the grave, but now her voice comes from some other room in another world in some other life. I hear myself think, "The whole world is one big grave." I hear the thought repeat, the shadow of an echo of a voice, my voice, which then disappears in the dreamless dark, as do I.

A month later I am at my friend's house in the basement and he and his friends are somehow making sex jokes with a Ouija board, working themselves up into fits of riotous laughter. I sit in silence not laughing and feeling the sickness of memory and pain and opioids all wash over me in waves of devastation. As the cacophony of sound short-circuits my nervous system, I feel a crackle of electric vertigo run along my skin head to toe in a shudder. Sara see me sitting in silence with my crutches resting beside me and says, "You're not like these other people here, are you?" I wince and look away and say nothing. She says, "Are you okay? You look really white? You're shivering, are you cold?" I say, "I think I have to throw up." The room gets so loud I cannot hear anything at all anymore.

A flood of memories invades my consciousness. My body is on the couch. They put metal plates and screws in my leg. They give me antiemetics to stop the vomiting from the opioids. My body has a dystonic reaction to the antiemetics, seizing and contorting every muscle into a clench of rigor and tension, closing my airways little by little with each passing minute. I am on the couch for several hours gasping and sputtering on my spit before someone comes into the room and notices. Some other Chris sees my body on the couch suffocating on saliva and says, "I think something's wrong with little Mason. He's not breathing right." I am sixteen miles away in the hospital again. They inject 400mg of Benadryl into my bottom. I make a sound like a balloon deflating as I gasp for air, a little lake of drool pooling on the emergency room table as every muscle I have relaxes all at once. I sputter into unconsciousness. My body is on the couch again, Vicodin tears streaming down my face. I vomit blood and mucous. My mouth tastes like death from the dried blood caked on my teeth and gums and lips. I have not bathed in over a month. I am nowhere. Suddenly, I hear their laughter. I am in another room again. They are still making ribald jokes with the Ouija board, increasing in intensity in direct proportion to the sound and volume of their laughter. I am nowhere. I cannot hear anything. I am in the room with them, but it is some other room. Silence reaches out, its boundless dimensions wrapping the endless spin of the world in slowness and softness, a ribbon of caresses. Everything becomes very still despite the crescendo of commotion and voices all around, as if the hidden hourglass of the world freezes with a sudden stop.

Somewhere in the distance I hear the quiet ocean, a cosmic symphony tuning up in a silent key. I am unsure when it is again.

As dusk approaches my mind plays tricks on me and tells me this is the only hour that ever is or was or will be, a prisoner of time where all the world is half-lit and drained of color and shadows grow long before night swallows them in its embrace of absence. There in that place nothing seems to echo quite like memory, and every whisper of thought is a ghost of someone long since gone.

I am outside in the crisp October air, leaning on my crutches for support. I can see my breath forming into tiny evanescent wisps devoured by the expanse of night and starlight. I hear music, but it is not really music.