A Thing of the Earth

Miko brought his shovel to the backyard before the sun was up and got to digging. The dozen towering oaks and poplars stood guard around him, their leafed arms crisscrossing in the sky. Eventually orange and blue glowed through their endless limbs as the sun crept upward. Birds got to singing and distant traffic got to humming, and Miko kept digging. Soon his wife came outside, alarmed by the pile of dirt her husband had built, and more alarmed to find him in a hole up to his nose. 

“What are you doing?”

He flung more dirt out of his hole. “I’m digging.”

“I see that. Why?”

He flung more dirt. “You remember what you said.”

She stood staring at him and said nothing. Miko kept digging. For a while she watched as the birds called and as the traffic hummed, and as the wind blew the branches of the towering trees in all sorts of directions. This sound seemed to catch Miko’s attention.

“Listen to that.”

“To what?”

“The wind in the trees. Isn’t it wonderful?”

She crossed her arms and said nothing.

“It’s wonderful,” Miko said. “There’s a voice out there. Maybe it’s the voice of the trees. Or it could be the voice of something else.” Then he got back to digging.

His wife went back inside. Miko dug deeper, throwing large rocks out of the hole, carefully chiseling around the maze of roots he had uncovered, making sure not to harm them as he went further into the ground. He turned his thoughts inward, guided by a distant voice. His hands seemed to operate without his conscious thought, and his contemplation seemed to follow a path he had not chosen.

A little while later his wife returned with coffee. She offered it to him and he did not take it, so she set it beside the hole. He was now so deep his head was a good five inches below the yard.

“I wish I understood you,” she said. “How you can blame this on me is — it’s insane. This is your decision. You decided to wake up early and dig a hole and refused to eat breakfast with your wife. And why? Because I said something hurtful last night?”

Miko stopped digging again and grabbed the coffee for a sip. 

“It wasn’t hurtful,” he said. “It was true. I’m taking your words seriously, that’s why I’m here.”

His wife’s face, if you can imagine it, took on the sort of shape a face takes when it has become consecutively more confused by a sequence of events, and any hope for clarity is banished. You know the sort of face. Miko noticed her face and put the coffee back on the ground.

“You said I had lost something,” he said. “I wasn’t the person you married, blah blah, that I ought to return to my roots.”

She laughed, and that face she had on turned into a new one, you know the sort. The sort of face you make when everything around you seems a preposterous joke. If you’ve ever looked in the mirror as you prepare for your day in court, you know the look.

“You put a lot of effort into a pathetic joke,” she said. “Returning to your roots? Are you kidding?”

Miko pointed to the tangled nest of roots within his hole, enveloping him like a prisoner. “Do these roots look like a joke?”

“Good luck with your hole,” she said, and she went back inside. 

Miko took these words to heart, and hoped for luck in his quest downward -- his quest to return to his roots not as a man, but as a thing of the earth, as a being of dust and dirt. He wished he would be around to see the look on her face. The wind and birds and traffic sang in choir around him. Voices lifted up to the sky.

It was lunch time before his wife came back outside, concerned that Miko hadn’t come in for water or food. This was starting to concern her. She found the pile of dirt much higher, the hole much deeper, and the nest of roots much denser. She did not find Miko. Or, she did not find any sign that he was here, or where he had gone. What she found was a formless thing of organic matter, wrapped up within these endless roots, moss growing from its edges, and dark, wet mud seeping out of its crevices.

“Miko!” she yelled. The birds and the wind and the traffic were the only reply.

The thing wrapped up in the roots in the earth changed form and its moss and mud seemed to reproduce, filling in the empty space of the hole around the roots. 

“Miko!” Again the birds and winds and traffic were all she could hear. For a moment she thought she heard a voice in the distance, not calling her name, but somehow calling to her nonetheless.

Soon the hole had been filled with moss and mud, and a wooden thing grew rapidly from it. It almost resembled a man, but a keener eye would see that it resembled a thing beyond man. Miko’s wife felt her heart churn in her chest. An unsettling fog overcame her, somewhere deep inside, and a realization was borne from that fog. It was the realization that she, too, must return to the roots. She went to the growing thing in her yard where the hole had been, and put her hand on it. Take me, she seemed to say. 

It took her.

Their children will come outside soon, wondering where Mom and Dad have gone. They will hear the sound of earth, a voice made of all its sounds in unison. The same fog will sweep over their hearts, and the same pull will be felt. The roots will take them, too.