AUTUMN 2024, SHORT STORY, 1000 WORDS
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You wandered through the muted grasses of a misty dreamscape, where tombstones marked the way forward. Your feet sank into millennia-old earth refreshed by yesterday’s rain. Through the haze, the occasional shape of a transparent balloon swelled into your vision before dissipating. The afterimages of ghostly eyes and open mouths were all that remained.
Most of the tombstones resided in stony silence, alone and unmarked. If you stood next to one, only the faintest outline of the next tombstone peeked from the blurry horizon, and when you reached it, the one behind you would disappear. You gave each you passed a polite nod of greeting, a silent acknowledgement to mirror their own. No other guides stood in the fog to point you along an invisible road.
At the first accompanied tombstone, you found a woman digging at its foot.
“Good day,” you said. Her silhouette clarified as you approached. Her shovel did not stop its meditative scooping. Dirt piled into steady mounds around her rectangular pit.
“Good day, young traveler,” she said.
Her back hunched from her years, and a smile entrenched wrinkles around her eyes. Waist-deep in the ground, she continued to hone away at the earth, until her short, silver hair mimicked the dewy grasses sticking up from the surface.
“Do you need help?” you asked. Her arms moved with a jerky rhythm like brittle twigs bound in twine, yet she lifted little mountains with the fluidity of splashing water.
“Oh, no thank you, young traveler,” she chuckled. “You’re too green to be digging just yet. I’m almost done anyway. This will be nice and comfortable for a proper rest soon.”
You peered into the pit, where she patted the soft dirt at the bottom and tucked sheets of dust into the frame.
“Comfortable?” you echoed.
“It’s been a long time coming for me, dear,” the woman said. “I could use a nice long sleep.”
She beamed up at you despite her frail arms clutching the shovel and her back bowed over the earth.
You continued your walk through the plains. At the next tombstone, this one silent and unaccompanied like many others, the digging woman behind you faded into the mist. You treaded around the rectangular indentations in the spongy ground at the foot of each subsequent tombstone. Some of the earthen perimeters were hewn with jagged, careless strokes; others were cut as if by a mason.
You passed many tombstones before you encountered another accompanied one, which you almost failed to greet. Unlike the first, this woman had descended twice the distance and dug with a ferocity unparalleled. She stood straight, with her legs drilled into the pit, and plunged her shovel as if hammering rock.
“Good day, are you all right?” you called. You balanced your toes on the edge.
She stabbed the earth a few times, dislodging ungraceful hunks of dirt before she looked up. Her mouth drooped into a frown, but the widened eyes turned her expression from an impending tantrum to a plaintive, tearful one.
“Miss, why aren’t you stopping me?” she asked.
“What should I do?” Lowering yourself to the lip of earth would not bring you to her outstretched hand and she did not reach up. The distance might have been too great even had she raised the shovel for you to grab.
“Come down,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I don’t think I can.”
“I said come down.” Her teeth bared as if in pain and her glossy hair, the same color as the ground, flitted across her eyes. “You come down here with me!”
You shook your head and stepped away from the edge. Her shrieks faded as you reached the next tombstone. When you looked back, you could neither hear the young woman nor see the marker of her excavation.
The mud swallowed your fraying shoes, and the mist discouraged retracing your footsteps. More silent tombstones passed in your wake. Pale rays of light illuminated particulates in the air and sculpted them into wraiths, their mouths open in wordless questions or soundless howls. The humidity filled your lungs with the smell of soil and sod.
A movement in the fog caught your eye, too intentional for the wind, and too opaque for a specter. As you approached the next tombstone, the shadow turned into a woman, lean and willowy, with a shovel in her hands. Her dark hair was a wild mess, but the silver-rimmed glasses that framed her eyes glinted, freshly polished.
Unlike those in your previous encounters, she dug with a reluctant gait that oscillated between a methodical transfer of miniature hills and lengthened pauses where she stood contemplating in the crevice. Occasionally, she would lift the shovel and chip it into the walls of her descent.
She continued to dig and chip as you stood at the open mouth of earth, where rocky teeth encircled her collarbone. Oddly, the hole she dug did not follow gravity in a direct path, but rather veered into a semicircular curve.
“Good day,” you called.
She let her shovel rest at her side and placed her hand into one of the indentations she had hollowed out. The makeshift grip filled her palm with silt.
“Keep walking the road aboveground,” she said.
“There isn’t a road as far as I can see,” you said. “But this, is this a grave or a tunnel?”
“Fate does not commit.” Her voice unrolled like a ball of thread, laid flat without a change in amplitude.
“Will you climb back out?”
“Haven’t decided that either.” She looked up at you. The muted light reflected two cloudy windows over her eyes. “You’d best keep walking. There are no roads underground that you won’t have to dig yourself.”
“Then is this a tunnel?”
“Could be a grave.”
She turned her back to you and resumed her digging, strategic and plodding as she carved out a ceiling of earth. You resumed your unguided walk through this neighbor to the netherworld, onward to the next tombstone, and wondered when you would have to dig under your own.
Nat Nguyen is an Asian-American writer of Vietnamese and Taiwanese heritage. She has been a pianist, a martial artist, an X-ray crystallographer, a software tester, and a psychology researcher—none of which prepared her for falling off a toboggan while descending a mountainside, being attacked by a crow, or getting lost in a snow-covered forest. She graduated from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing. You can find her at natnguyenh.carrd.co.
