Grains of Dirt

A true story, by W. McCrae.

A brief note to the new subscribers who arrived in the past week: Welcome! You’ve caught me away on summer break. Normal programming will resume in early August. In the meantime, my good friend

W. McCrae

—fellow author, essayist, and cartographer of haunted landscapes—has volunteered to mind the shop while I’m away. You’ll find the first of her guest posts below. Enjoy.

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The divorce was finalized in May, and my mom and I finished moving out in August. Not far, at least not too far, from the big family home where my dad and younger siblings would remain behind, nursing wounds from a separation too long in the making—walking distance by most definitions, and I walked just about everywhere in those days. I was fifteen then; determined, in my mercenary adolescent way, to take advantage of the structural collapse of life as I’d always known it. Childhood was concluded now, on a timeline out of my control. But through the settling dust, I could just about glimpse an open horizon ahead of me, a field of hitherto unheard-of potential for my own self-actualization.

In predictable form for a teenager, my idea of ‘self-actualization’ really just meant ‘getting away with shit.’ The name of the game was to capitalize on my parents’ emotional exhaustion and disunited front, in the hopes of slipping some sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll through the cracks; it’s not a pretty picture, but fifteen is not a pretty age. So I packed out of the only house I’d ever known as home in order to follow my mother across town to the little rental on Pleasant Street, where I knew I would have an excess of unmonitored hours in which to discover myself. Goodbye forever to the awkward bookish child [with married parents] whom I’d always been; hello to the jaded and worldly woman I was champing to become.

The first step on the path to womanhood would be to get myself a boyfriend, of course—ideally a boyfriend my father neither liked nor approved of, but couldn’t stop me from being with, not while I lived in my mother’s home. The boy I landed on was not aimlessly sullen like most seventeen-year-olds, but bonafide scrappy—having come up rough-and-tumble across the country like a New World gypsy, frequently homeless, occasionally in foster care, never better-off than poor. He wore ratty leather jackets and a limp blond mohawk. He carried multiple blades on his person at all times, for protection of himself and others. 

He was a teddy-bear, really. Terrible in academics. Uncomfortably willing to admit his dream of getting blown up overseas as a Marine. But he was good to me and had a storied life to tell. I hardly ever believed those stories the first time, and not without reason. He claimed once that a cat-scratch on his lip had come from a hobo with a box-cutter: the awkward lie of an awkward kid trying to impress his crush. Another time, he mentioned that he’d recently given court testimony to send his bastard stepfather to prison for life. That turned out to be true. 

His most outlandish tales—of having once astrally projected from his body in the heat of a fever, or of shaping smoke or shattering a drinking glass with his mind—left me unsure of what to believe, given all precedent. Whether or not he was totally credible, I enjoyed the feeling of having someone so unexpected in my corner. If nothing else, it would serve as good fodder for my own inevitable Becoming. 

Time came to move into the Pleasant Street rental, and my new boyfriend gallantly stepped up to supply a bit of extra muscle, so that my mom wouldn’t have to ask her ex-husband for help. Without complaint he hauled my desk and mattress and tens of boxes up into the sweltering attic bedroom; there, within a few weeks, we would lose our virginities to each other. In a lull between phases of work, he stopped to look around the afternoon-lit space, and began scouting its points of entry: the door, the window, and a wide vent in the floor, which ran through eight inches of ductwork and opened directly into the living room below. 

“Do you have any jars?” he asked me after some consideration. “And dirt?”

We ventured outside together with three small mason jars in hand from the half-unpacked kitchen. Each one he filled with a dry fist of potting soil from the late-summer garden, then sheepishly placed them at the openings to my new room. 

“To keep things out,” was his commentary, light on explanation as to what sorts of ‘things’ he was talking about, exactly. “That’s just how it works—if they try to get you while you’re sleeping, they’ll find the dirt outside your door. They have to stop there and count every grain.” 

I wasn’t convinced, but neither would I begrudge the man a harmless bit of folk-magic. Really, I admired his effortless weirdness; some part of me hoped to absorb it though proximity. “How do you count a grain of dirt?” I asked, and he assured me that was basically the whole point. He proposed laying down lines of salt along the threshold too, but I thought my mom wouldn’t like that.

The following six months of gross hedonism and minimal parental oversight were not really the teenage dream I’d envisioned. Not a bad time, not by far, but neither had I been transformed by my new circumstances in the way I’d hoped. I still didn’t really understand how to make friends, even around the school subjects and activities where I excelled; I still found myself spending all off-hours in unchallenging solitude, reading and writing and making art rather than socializing or engaging in juvenile malfeasance, like a normal kid. 

And I still had that feeling of terrible, aching dread on the rare occasion when I returned home—or I should say, when I visited my father’s home, rattling yet half-empty for months after my departure. One gray autumn evening after school, I stopped in to find my dad boiling macaroni and peas on the stove; within ten minutes of my arrival he received texts from both my brother and sister saying that they were with friends tonight, and wouldn’t be home for dinner. Dad absorbed their alibis and wordlessly took his one-bowl meal in front of the kitchen computer, the solitary source of light in a cold and cavernous building where someone’s family used to live.

I walked back to Mom’s house in the rain, feeling like a piece of dogshit caught in my own wet tread. In bubbling fits of self-pity I imagined running away and never coming back. I imagined dying—not forever—just long enough to pass the intolerable span of time between now and whenever life was going to feel worth living again. The terms of this existence were self-evidently bullshit, and I should not be obligated to endure them.

In moments where my powers of compartmentalization failed me, I could have vented to my ever-attentive boyfriend, or taken out my feelings on the blank canvas of a word processor. I had a better idea: to wedge each unwelcome experience to an insensate depth between the folds of my brain, and let them calcify. No festering, no signs of infection, just a head full of hard lumps that weren’t worth thinking about. The results spoke for themselves. Most of the time, I felt nothing at all.

Back on Pleasant Street, Mom was back to dating already. Not too obtrusively, not too seriously—she had a Friend whom I didn’t see too often, although he was the reason she might sometimes let me know to expect her home late. No problem, whatever, see you when you get here. I can feed myself. Really, I enjoyed having so much freedom: to sit alone, ping-ponging off the walls of my room. This is what I’d wanted. 

Wintertime cinched the days tighter at each end. I don’t remember anything about the holiday season that year, although I suppose it must have happened. 

One February night, nine o’clock or thereabouts, I heard my mom’s late arrival home from upstairs. She’d been out with her Friend that evening, and his chunky blue hippie van loomed on the street outside my window while both their voices drifted loudly though the vent in the bedroom floor. With no desire to make an appearance, I put myself back to work until the front door closed again and all commotion quieted to the gentle shuffle of bedtime. Eventually my bladder compelled me downstairs. I found Mom’s door hanging open with dim light through the crack, and I thought nothing of popping my head in to say goodnight.

She was already asleep, but not alone—not in any state of indecency, but chastely curled in the arms of her Friend. My body reacted to remove me from the scene quicker than my mind could really comprehend it, but afterimages chased my vision all the way down the hall and into the bathroom mirror. When I came to a stop, I found that I was shaking and I didn’t know why. What was the big deal, anyway? She was having a cuddle, but what does that…?

I’d thought it was my dad, at first. The gray hair and heavy body, the bald pate, the deep breathing—I’d thought my dad was in bed with my mom, like he always used to be. And yet, all the signifiers added up to a lie—he hadn’t been in that bed for a long time now, and he never would be again. His pillow was full of the head of a stranger—

I dropped my toothbrush in the sink. The walls were not meeting at their proper ninety degrees, and the breathing from down the hall sounded deafening in my ears.

I made it back to my room just in time to break open the wildest crying fit of my life. Nothing from even the bitterest thick of the divorce itself could compare; I’d known back then to be on guard for emotional riptides such as these, but grown soft and complacent in the months since. What came pouring out of me on the bedroom floor was brackish saltwater and thick-legged snot—occasionally a hot gag of bile—all my humors surging for some equilibrium against the sickness. I knelt in place and retched, then crawled into bed and howled. I didn’t care if they heard me. I wanted them to hear me. If my mom really loved me she would be able to hear me, and she would rush to give me comfort and finally understand the previously-inexpressible depths of my despair. She would be so sorry. I just wanted her to say sorry.

No one came. There was no audience to my performance of plunging fingers again and again into a seeping wound; I tore out every brick from all the fortress walls inside me and found myself equally alone in a pile of rubble, now with a sore throat and a stress headache to boot. I choked and begged for attention that never manifested. Each new wave of misery brought diminishing returns. Even sadness was losing interest in our play.

Gradually, listless tears blurred the room around me and washed it out to sea. I gave up and cried myself to sleep in a mess of briny linens.

At exactly one o’clock in the morning, something woke me up again. 

It was a sound—a breath of something not quite like music, come drifting up through the vent in my bedroom floor. Consciousness returned to me like a light switched on, so that instantly upon waking I tuned back to the key of pissed-the-fuck-off. I laid in place fuming and glaring at the clock, waiting for the noise that had woken me to sound off again. 

There it came: a single, tuneless woodwind note, five or ten seconds long with glissando falling off the end as it exhausted itself. It sounded like a piccolo or recorder, being played incompetently in the living room directly below.

The silence that followed again was just long enough for me to wonder if I’d imagined it. Then the whistle went off for a third time—same pitch, same fall, although a different length. It was shorter than the first two.

I could vividly imagine what must be going on down there. Mom’s Dickhead Friend had woken in the night, obviously, and decided that 1 AM was the perfect hour to hold some kind of bullshit hippie flute ceremony in the front room. It was an almost hilariously inconsiderate thing to do, and in between the flute’s fading-out and then its sounding once again, I dizzily fantasized about throwing back the blankets, flying downstairs, and laying into that stupid old man and my mom as well, if she got in the way. How dare they, how dare they, how dare they pull a stunt like this—

But I remained in place without rising, inflamed by nerve and righteous anger. The woodwind note only ever sounded for a few seconds at a time, with longer spans in between; I assumed each bout was going to be the last, so that when it inevitably started up again my whole endocrine system clenched anew in rage. After several minutes on-and-off, the dynamic changed: the next time that breathy flute droned, the flat note of a very muted brass floated up to accompany it. The tones of the two instruments didn’t harmonize, and they kept only the roughest time with one another. The brassist sounded barely able to follow the flautist’s lead. Once they played; then again; and then yet again.

I never stopped being angry, but I started to wonder if my assumption about the sound’s origin might be wrong. I had no idea what I was hearing. I only knew for sure that it was coming from directly below the vent in my bedroom floor.

Eventually, the tuneless duet drew to an unceremonious end. One final time it played, followed by a stretch of quiet longer than any other, and when I felt certain that the performance was really over, I opened my eyes. The clock said 1:10 AM.

I sat up in bed and peeked out the window. Mom’s Friend’s van was not parked in front of the house.

Downstairs I found only silence, not a light on and not a thing moving. I woke my mom to ask her if her Friend had left; sleepily, she told me he’d been gone for hours. 

I asked if she knew what was making that noise. Although her bedroom was directly off the living room with the door hanging open, she said she hadn’t heard a thing.

I really am good at compartmentalization, most of the time. I went back to bed and fell asleep without too much trouble.

When I shared the story with my boyfriend, it was mostly as a curiosity. Nothing had really happened, after all; it was probably nothing, but God bless him for taking me so seriously. He asked for every weird detail in triplicate, and then sat stewing over the thought of me crying alone and vulnerable in the night. He said he wished he’d been there to help. I told him that was sweet but unnecessary, and then when I in turn expressed that I wished I’d gone downstairs to investigate the sound while it was ongoing, he blanched in fear.

“Better that you didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “Sounds like luring you out of bed was the whole plan.”

He was, as always, full of interesting ideas, to which I gave a characteristically measured response. “Make it make sense,” I argued. “A flute plays in an empty room to lure me out of bed—and why?” He only shrugged. 

“That’s just how it works,” he said. “And probably worth trying, if their only other option was to spend the whole night counting grains of dirt.”