Dirt World

Squinting into the morning sunlight, Hazel breathes a defeated sigh into her coffee’s steam, sending it spiralling. Through the living room window, she sees three mounds of dark soil in the yard that hadn’t been there yesterday. It’s one of those golden mornings that drape clouds in orange gems, yet all she can think about is her dad’s impending mole rant. After the amount of effort he’s put into the newest traps, his fury will be terrible.

They’re turning my yard into Swiss cheese!
It looks like torn-up garbage!
I’m going to dig them out of the ground and wring their necks!

Hazel’s mom was the only one who could ever contain the mole rage. Ever since she died, they’ve been getting worse. He’s developed a strange squint that has become more pronounced lately. Particularly during his rants. The last few times, he’s bared his teeth in an unsettling way that Hazel’s never seen before.

The great War of the Lawn has been going on since before she was born. They’d come and go, those rodent warriors, flaring up in one summer or another, only to disappear for a year, maybe two—just long enough for Dad to let his guard down. He caught one, once, when she was a kid. He thought perhaps she’d like to see it. She did not. Instead of a nose, it had something like the palm of a hand, the skin pink and florid. In addition to the flippers it had for legs, it had looked like some grotesque alien. It squirmed in the trap, sending Hazel squealing as she ran away. That squirming rodent haunted her nightmares for years afterwards, and the things have sickened her ever since.

From down the hall comes the choke and hiss of the shower starting up. Hazel might be able to get him in a good mood with some banter before he surveys the lawn. Once he notices, she knows, there won’t be anything she can do. She fetches the waffle maker she got him for his 70th birthday. He used to love Mom’s waffles and was so deliberate about pouring precise amounts of syrup into each square segment. A “flavour grid,” he called it. Waffles might help. There’s a thick layer of grease-soaked dust on top of her gift and a flaking crust of batter covers the iron. It resists her furious scrubbing admirably. The thing’s barely passable by the time she hears Dad’s shower go silent. She pours his coffee into a mug, adds a swirl of cream and a scoop of sugar, and hopes for the best.

His booming baritone announces his emergence from the bathroom. It’s some half-forgotten hippie anthem—an old favorite of Hazel’s mother’s. The matching grey on grey jogging pants and sweater he wears don’t quite meet at the peak of his belly. There’s a rosy strip of skin where his middle is exposed. It’s hairier than she remembers. He’s damp, and the grey cotton darkens three or four shades around his chest, armpits, and crotch.

“Morning. Feel like waffles?” Hazel says, careful not to heap on too much cheer.

“I don’t feel like waffles. I feel like an old man who slept like crap,” he says, punctuating his words with snorts and throaty chortles. “Pancakes are better.”

It’s his surly old man schtick he’s been putting on since long before he actually became a surly old man. The smiling crinkles around his eyes give away his playfulness.

“Yeah, I’ll make you pancakes if you want.”

Same batter, different process, no problem.

“Pick one or the other, quit waffling.”

He winks and they laugh together. Hazel puts the powder, milk, and eggs into a bowl, then swats the mixture smooth. Dad makes his way into the living room. Each step he takes sinks her heart further into her bowels—he’s going to see the mounds. She tries to think of something to distract him. The waffle iron hisses as it heats up. An aroma of burning fills the kitchen as bits of old, hardened batter, impossible to scrub off, begin to blacken. Hazel can think of nothing that will stop him, so she continues to stir. It had been such a nice morning.

“Damnit, three new ones!”

The batter sizzles when it’s poured onto the iron. The hiss she usually savours is drowned out by her dad’s tirade. He’s still going strong when the waffles are served. His vitriol dominates breakfast, and Hazel has to nod along with every frothing ounce or risk having the anger turn on her. She’s not convincing enough. He fixes her with a glare.

“I suppose I’m boring you,” he says, on the brink of shouting. “Nothing worth listening to, huh?”

When he swats his plate from the table, the waffle lands on the black-and-white tiles, syrupy side down. Hazel’s fingers come away sticky after she cleans Dad’s mess. Once upon a time, they would binge-watch shows or shout at sports. Now Hazel’s weekend visits are spent taking care of essentials—groceries, laundry, taking out the garbage, listening to mole rants. The only thing he ever asks for help with is the moles. As a result, she’s become a reluctant expert in ineffective mole extermination. The thought of digging up a trap with one of them inside turns her stomach. Yet week after week, she helps set up medieval looking snares, plant poisonous smoke bombs, and flood holes with garden hoses. When her father began talking about pouring gasoline into his yard and lighting it up, Hazel was forced to draw a line. Things have been frosty between them ever since. His nails have grown.

“I’ll squish their little rodent heads between my fingers,” he says on his way to the bathroom. He stoops more than he did, stoops and squints.

To him, each mound of churned mole dirt is a personal attack. To the moles, however, Hazel imagines she is the Devil, dispensing horrors from above, unleashing plagues, yanking them out of their dark and cozy homes to suffer terrible deaths. This mythical Mole Devil brims with an unfathomable malice that is hard to enjoy waffles with, so Hazel makes up an excuse to leave while she fishes car keys out of her pocket. He’s a sloppy eater now. He will pick up the partially chewed food that escapes his lips and nibble it off his fingertips. Hazel loathes the nibbling.

“I’ll skin one and shove it’s bleeding pelt back into the hole as a warning to the rest.”

“I’m going to do a shop.”

Lately, he hardly notices when she makes her weak excuses to leave. She stays out longer than she means to, haunting grocery stores and coffee shops until guilt brings her back. When she returns, her father is on all fours in the grass, his face inches from a dismantled pile of dirt.

“It was twitching,” he says.

“I know, Dad.”

“I’m going to get them.”

“I know.”

His voice growls and squeaks.

“I’m going to make BLTs for lunch,” Hazel says. He remains on his knees, staring into the dirt, pawing at the ground. “I don’t think they’re coming back just now, Dad.”

When they say goodbye, he’s looking over Hazel’s shoulder, flicking his eyes from mound to mound.

“. . . six, seven, eight . . .” she hears him say under his breath. There’s only six.

At the next visit, Hazel has to let herself in after knocking for a long time. That doorbell hasn’t worked in years. It takes a while to find the spare key on Hazel’s overcrowded keychain.

“Dad?” she calls when she gets inside.

There’s no response. Muddy footprints step all over each other throughout the house. There’s been a home invasion, she’s certain of it. Dad’s dead or hogtied somewhere suffocating into his own sock. Adrenaline pickles her brain as she fumbles from room to room, past her mom’s old sickly sweet porcelain figures, her decorative plates, the box of yarn and knitting needles. At last she finds him in the dark, hunched forward on a rocking chair in the basement. On his lap is a shoebox. He coos to something inside. Though his eyes widen briefly when he sees Hazel, they look smaller and darker than usual. Gone is the emerald glint he passed on to her.

“Dad? Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“Oh, hey…” he spends a moment mumbling before giving up the search for my name. “Take a looksee.”

He nods to the box.

Hazel peer inside to find a cowering mole pressed into a corner. After an involuntary pair of steps backward, she takes a breath and leans for another look. It’s a soft, grey dot against the white cardboard. The thing looks awkward, and she can almost feel the terror in it.

“How?”

“I saw one of the mounds moving and I grabbed it,” he says, staring at the captive creature. Dad wiggles his nose in a way she’s never seen him do before. “It’s just a baby.”

Reaching with the pad of his pinky, he gently strokes its fur. His skin is like a baby’s now. Hazel and her father go outside and release the mole together. It swims into the earth effortlessly, disappearing in an instant. When she leaves this time, her father counts the mole holes again. The anger’s out of his whispers, though.

Work calls her away for a month. It can’t be avoided. She thinks about her dad often while she’s rattling around the grey hotel room. It’s worse on the weekends, when she should be there with him. The calls are lopsided. Each of his responses become harder to hear, yet he seems happy enough.

“Weather’s beautiful, I’ve been getting outside more,” he says.

“You’re okay?”

She can hear the concern in her own voice. If Hazel can hear it, her father can.

“I’m fine.”

When she returns, her dad is sitting in a hole in his back yard. It’s deep, over his head. At the bottom he has formed a dirt-replica of the recliner sagging in his living room.

“It’s comfy down here,” he insists.

The earth around him muffles his voice.

The sight of her father sends a wash of adrenaline through Hazel. His appearance is disgusting. Soil coats him. He’s shirtless with patches of thick, gray fuzz covering his chest, shoulders, and back. It’s not the wiry silver hairs that used to poke through his sweaters, this fuzz is soft, velvety. It’s on the backs of his hands and on his cheeks. It seems to repel the dirt that smears the rest of him. His jogging pants are nearly soiled black. Hazel’s mind races to grasp what could possibly have caused such a change. It’s happened so quickly. He squints hard up at her when she kneels to pull him up.

He reaches up to her with splayed fingers, and Hazel finds she doesn’t want to touch him. Long, pale fingernails hook from each of his thick digits. His arms have shortened and grown wider, his face is more pointed and pinched. She shoves the revulsion away and goes to grab his hand. He dodges Hazel’s grasp and spreads a layer of dirt up her forearm. He seems rather pleased with himself at that. The dirt does feel nice. It has a whiff of nostalgia, of childhood play, bugs, sticks, stones, and hidden treasures.

There’s a shiver of more revulsion as well. She pulls her hand away. He seems content to lay in his hole, so Hazel heads to the kitchen to make him some noodle soup and to think about what she’s going to do next. She needs help, but if she takes him to a doctor, he’ll be scrutinized to death. They’ll gather from around the world to drain his blood for analysis, subject him to a litany of questions, monitor him day and night until he ceases to be a person. No, she can’t have that.

She hopes the soup has cooled enough by the time she walks it out to him. A little bit spills as she lowers it. Dad doesn’t eat the soup, though Hazel notices him pluck the occasional worm from the dirt and plop it into his mouth. There isn’t much to do around the place with him occupying his hole. His clothes are clean, the fridge is stocked, his car hasn’t moved since spring.

“Will you come inside?” she asks when the sun dips and the sky turns orange.

He looks around his hole contentedly and shrugs.

“For me?” Hazel says.

He climbs out slowly, hesitantly, like he’s stepping through a mirror. He glares at the dusk’s light. It might be fear as well. The change in him makes it tough to tell. Her dad settles once he’s inside. She runs a comb over him to get the dirt and pebbles out of his fur. She gets him into the bathtub and begins rinsing, coaxing the dirt from beneath his long, wide fingernails. He likes the warm water. His lively nose makes Hazel smile and he smiles back.

“What are we going to do?” she asks him. His smile fades when he spots a tear spill from her eye. Hazel swallows hard to keep the rest back. They hug and his velvety fuzz feels nice. Dad doesn’t speak for the rest of the visit.

Next weekend, he’s gone. The hole in his yard has been filled, patted firm, and reseeded. She calls for him and has the strangest certainty that making loud noises will only drive him off further. Hazel’s search takes her into the basement, where she catches the mold and clay scent of soil. Drywall and framing have been pulled apart and the concrete foundation is torn into chunks. What incredible effort it must have taken to break his way into that new world of darkness. Before she starts fussing over the dirt and debris everywhere, Hazel spends a long while thinking about her father blindly tunnelling, navigating the depths of his yard. She hopes he can find his way around.

All sorts of subterranean dwellers are getting into the house. Grubs, worms, ants, all make themselves at home—ambassadors from her father’s dirt world. Hazel makes him a Caesar salad with chicken breast sliced onto it. She leaves it next to the hole. He won’t eat it, she knows, but he might be tempted by the maggots once they show up.