Parishioners of the Drought
by Dylan T. Bosworth
Whispers. I heard ’em, but Momma couldn’t. Not then, anyway. She might have heard ’em when she got closer, though. When she went down there in the hole at the end.
Down there in the dirt.
That’s where those whispers had started out one hot as hell afternoon, one dusty, sweaty afternoon where it felt like the devil had just gone and opened up his front door and fanned out some of them flames up there onto all us people just trying to be good.
Still trying to go to church, even with all the world happening around us.
Even with all the dirt.
Shoot, that’s where I was when it started. Back on that summer day, heck, it wasn’t even a Sunday, but I was being punished nonetheless. Out there in the dirt with that tired spade-shaped shovel, just huckin’ loads of dirt around, out of the ground into a pile, just shovelin’ away until that hole I was diggin’ was big enough for my little body and deep enough no varmint was going to dig me up like Momma said they’re wont to do.
I guess she took offense to the way I was breathing and chewing at the breakfast table in the morning or somethin’, because that was the only time I’d even seen her all dang day. I hadn’t thrown a fuss or nothin’ about having the same stinking bread that she’d shucked the furry green mold off two days ago. Before she scraped it, I thought I caught a glimpse of a little group of pinheads on it, like little fungi just getting ready to sprout up how they do just after the right amount of rain.
I just ate it up while watching her dig the spuds out of some soft-looking potatoes that stunk to high heaven and, when she tossed them into a bowl of water to soak life back into them after cutting out all the black spots and rot, she’d trundled over to me and grabbed me up by my ear.
“He’s lookin’ down on you, boy,” she’d said, leadin’ me to the rear door, ear pinched between her fingers, just about ready to pluck it right off. She’d said, “Get your shovel and start digging.”
So that’s what I did.
I didn’t need to ask where anymore. Only so many places left in the yard where the ground wasn’t soft with another little kid-sized grave I hadn’t dug up and filled in again already. I was so bad, so sinful so often, Momma was sure I was going to get smited any day now. Just about any time, that long crooked bolt from the clouds was going to snake down and zip right through my head, and down I’d go, she told me.
Momma wasn’t in no shape to be diggin’ no more graves. Not since my Daddy’s, anyway.
My shovel sliced down through hard-packed dirt, almost just sand and dust clumped like bricks now with how dried out it was. With every clump I pulled up, swaths of white junk like cobwebs tried to cling it back into the hole I plucked it from. When I tossed the clumps onto the pile, those networks of white thread seemed to vibrate. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I saw them shudder and snake toward each other like electrified spiders’ webs.
Sweat was pouring down my back, and sliding down in the back of my pants making me all sorts of uncomfortable, and I knew that I’d be aching all over and my skin burning the next day, and just for showin’ it, I knew too that’d I’d be the one to have to take on all the extra chores while Momma took another day’s rest. Said that was my punishment, too, that God up there didn’t smite me down after all, but the burn and the aches were a punishment all the same, and who was she, she’d said, to stand in the way of the almighty God.
I couldn’t ever argue that point with her, nor’d I want to, so I just kept right on digging, and I’d deal with the rest tomorrow. That’s what I was thinking anyway.
It took me a minute on that scorching hot as hell afternoon back then to take notice that the rustly whispering, like paper being torn, wasn’t coming from my own head, lost in thought as I was.
I felt whatever was whispering to me down there in the grave, it should have been just my thoughts, as violent and as terrible as the words were. Sometimes my head got like that. Black and mean and my fingers itching to crush somethin’. To feel the life wash out of somethin’ smaller than me, you know, that kind of stuff.
Maybe it was thoughts such as those that had Momma tellin’ me all the time I’d be snuffed out and dragged off to Hell. Hell, maybe she was a mind reader after all.
But Hell sometimes didn’t seem all that bad, really. Probably wasn’t much worse than whatever this life was turning out to be for me here. Thoughts like that, or on the rare occasion I’d gotten up the nerve to voice something like that out loud, had just served to get me diggin’ more graves, so maybe it was all my fault after all. Maybe Momma was just being just. Or righteous, or whatever it was she thought of herself.
That’s not what the whispers were saying to me in the dirt though. Lord, I had to strain hard as heck to hear them, but when I did, they filled my head like I was surprised I hadn’t been hearing them out here in the yard my whole entire life, as much time as I spent diggin’ around out there with that lichen-covered shovel that couldn’t get clean no matter what I did to it, my slick sweat just seeming to make it grow worse.
I came inside, all covered in grime and dirt that was caking into mud on my cheeks, and down into the crack of my ass. God, pardon my language. Momma was tilted back in her frayed brown ol’ recliner, crumbs and smears and globs of food all over her as the chair cried beneath her with each of her jowly guffaws, watching The Price is Right.
Momma knew what she was doing with that game, never callin’ out an answer even once that I can remember was wrong. I don’t know how she did it anyway, not like she ever had any money, anyhow. Our only groceries came from Tom, her boyfriend, brought over in a big black trash bag and spilled on the table whenever he’d come around after some job or another or some run he said he’d been out on, whatever that meant.
I could tell in the glint of Momma’s eye that she was dreamin’ it was her up there on the TV then, just impressing everybody with her knowledge of all the world’s wares and how much a price they took to stick up in your home and fill your cabinets and closets and drawers with until your whole house was just burstin’ with plastic and labels and colors and smells. She’d have been good up on one of those podiums, whisked away to be all lit up under the bright studio lights and whatnot, away from Tom and his yellin’ and scabby fists, away from me and the troubles always seemin’ to follow me around, but we both knew it wasn’t meant for her.
Wasn’t meant for us.
“Momma?” I whispered.
She jerked up like I about scared the soul right out of her, and she turned to me with her nostrils flared so wide I was sure smoke was about to come pouring out.
“Boy! What you think you’re doing back up in here? I know that pit ain’t dug out already?” She had a bunch of shiny wrappers clutched in her palms, empty bags that had pictures that looked like pretzels and chocolates, and cakes with zebra stripes, a whole long cardboard box with the zebras on it she was all trying to stuff away and smash up and pile down into the folds of her dress or down in the sides of her chair.
I ignored it the way I knew I was supposed to. There was the clock on the wall above her head, old and dusty over the once-glossy wood, and Jesus was on there, staring up at something that couldn’t be seen like he was prayin’ to the sharp, golden arms that told the time. Whatever it was that caught his eye up there, I swore then that it’d probably been looking down on me, too.
Down on Momma.
That look on Jesus’s face seemed to get harder and harder the more Momma started huffin’ more chores on me while she lay in her chair more often than not, sinking into it and molding to it.
If he was judgin’, probably I could, too.
“There’s somethin’ out there,” I said. I tried to tell her a bit about the stuff I heard while I was diggin’, but I knew she didn’t believe what I was saying. The chair cracked and groaned as she rolled to get up out of it, and before I thought much about moving, my ear was back pinched between her fingers, and we were heading back out the door.
The dry dirt of the yard, if you could call it a yard, crunched under the weight of our steps as Momma led us out back to where my shovel was stabbed into the earth before an almost-finished hole. She was breathing hard already, and I could smell the bitterness of her sweat as she struggled her way toward the hole, towing me behind her, and me draggin’ my feet to pretend her staggered gait was in any way faster than my own two legs.
It’d make her feel better at least. Make her feel like she was in control.
Sometimes that was better, if I was being totally honest. If she was in control, she’d take it a bit easier than if she felt like I was getting the best of her. Like a beast in a corner, she’d be liable to lash out.
We stood over the hole now, and Momma let go of my ear, kind of tossing me off to the side, like she’d had enough of holding on to it. She held her arms out to the sides and peered around the yard before glaring down to where I stood, fingering the soft gray craters of the spreading lichen that washed over the shovel handle.
“What’s supposed to be out here, boy? What’re you making me miss my show for?”
“Shh,” I said, and Momma’s eyes went big like I just said a curse, and she reared her hand back to slap me one.
“No!” I yelled, arms instinctually rising to protect my head. “I mean listen. Can’t you hear it?”
She craned her neck, tilting her ear in the air. She stood like that for a minute, trying to draw out of the silence she felt whatever it was I was trying to show her.
The whispers grew around us, a thousand, heck, a million hissing voices, all raspin’ together like the crumbling of wasps’ nests. A cacophony of begging voices, undulating now, almost chanting, blending to become one, torturous voice, callin’ out to me, begging, begging.
Momma put her hands on her hips, and I smiled at her. “You hear them, Momma?” I said. “You hear ’em down in the dirt. What do you reckon it is?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she backhanded me across the jaw, and I landed hard on my back, seeing stars. My hand stuck tight to the shovel, the flakes of crumbly gray feelin’ like barnacles clinging to my palm.
“Ain’t nothin’ out here, you shit,” she said, “Just you’s all. Just you trying to get out of doing your tasks.” She wiped a hand down her face, flicking sweat toward the ground. “Look at you there, boy, you clumsy ass. Got me out here in the heat, and for what? So you can see me struggle? See me sweatin’ while you prance around on your skinny little legs, you sonofabitch. You shoulda never been born, you; down there all filth and grime, slackin’ off in the eyes of the Lord. Disobeyin’ your momma. I should just lock the doors up, that’s what I should do. Shut up them winders and let you cook out here. Let you cook, or let you freeze when the dark comes. That’s what I should be doing. You’re nothin’ but another ache in my bones, you know that?”
As I stared up at her, her big round face eclipsing the sun, I could see flecks of something — things — like little fuzzies or squigglies squirmin’ in my eyes. I could feel worms wriggling at the back of my throat, balled up in there like a swarmin’ nest of nightcrawlers. The whispers rose in timbre, now voices calling out to me somewhere within and somewhere beyond.
Momma turned to waddle back up the yard to the house as I rose to my feet, just so she could flop back down on her chair, spill food down her face and get bigger and bigger, hungrier and hungrier, and just meaner all along the way. Prayin’ for me, but mostly just prayin’ for herself, I knew.
“Momma,” I said.
She turned back to face me, glaring something fierce, face as red as fire.
“They’re thirsty,” I said. “So dry out here. All they talk about is being thirsty. Being hungry.”
She flew back toward me like some chargin’ bull, threatening to run me right down, pound me straight into the packed dirt below. My heart throbbed so hard it was thuddin’ in my temples, the whole while, the screamin’, the begging, surged in my ears so loud it distorted and shook the very air around me. I felt that flaking lichen scrape against my palm, and the shovel handle felt like it had life swarmin’ within it, and like my hand attached to it no longer belonged to me at all.
As my Momma got just about close enough to pummel me to dust, I slung that shovel up as hard as I could like a baseball bat, the dull spade edge catching her just below her jaw.
I had to wrench the shovel free from her neck like a hatchet stuck in a stump, putting one of my feet on her hip, and yankin’ the shovel with all my might.
When it came loose, blood poured over her neck and down her blouse, coating her in a thick redness that looked like paint in the fevered sun. She fell to her knees and dropped headfirst into the pit I had dug, and all that I felt inside for her then was nothin’ at all.
The voices screamed and writhed, and I watched my mother’s body crash into the dirt at the bottom of the pit, and within seconds, tendrils of white crept from that soil and began to spider across her, growin’ and branching off, covering every bit of exposed flesh.
My skin crawled in a good way. Like somewhere beneath the surface, there was a bolt of elation struggling to free itself from the confines of my slick and labored veins.
The dirt grew wet and soggy with red and, within an instant, it was soaked up, seeping into the rough, porous ground below. All around, all the old graves I’d dug and filled in, their rectangles of loose, messy soil rumbled and heaved as thousands of bright red, sticky heads burst forth and bloomed into blood-tinted mushrooms, their caps fanning out and dripping crimson globules that splashed and soaked into the ground, sproutin’ up more caps, more mushrooms.
The voices came to a climax as Momma’s body in the pit shriveled in on itself, until the dried-up, now thin, wrinkled husk shrunk away and the sprawling, white, root-like webs pulled and sucked her down beneath the dirt, her body crackin’ and breaking as the ground swallowed her whole.
Now just whispers again, the voices echoed what could only be some sort of Thanks before disappearin’ entirely. The yard was flush with new life, soaking in the rays of the fading sun, the red, inky caps of the fungi spread wide and thriving, nearly luminescent in the dying light of the summer afternoon.
I went back inside, careful where I was steppin’ along the way, and sat in front of the TV. Momma’s chair felt crisp and stiff beneath me where I lay in the warm groove she’d worn. As I lay there nustlin’ in, feelin’ the crumbs itch beneath my skin, I watched people clap and smile under the bright stage lights of Momma’s favorite show.
Copyright © 2024 by Dylan T. Bosworth
