That’s God, Emily
Emily remembered long ago when her parents found her in the backyard as a child, knees in the mud, digging in the dirt with her bare hands. She looked up at them as they loomed over her, the gentle rain beading on her father’s glasses and painting dark dots on her mother’s red jacket. Emily started to cry, the rain mixing with her tears as they dripped down her dirt-stained face.
“Oh honey,” her mom said, kneeling down to hug her, “is this because of Rusty?”
The name of the family’s recently deceased Irish setter made the tears fall harder, as her chest heaving as she sobbed. That he’d been cut so quickly from her life was a wound still so fresh, and it hurt worse than she could even fathom at that age. Something about that pain had compelled her to dig, and the only thing she had thought to do was listen to that urge. Emily hugged her mom tight and buried her face in her red jacket.
“They said something like this might happen at the vet,” her father whispered. “Kids just have a hard time handling this kind of thing.”
“I know,” her mom replied, sharing his hushed tone, “I’m having a hard time handling it too.”
“Hey, Em,” her father said, “let’s get you inside. It’s freezing out here.”
She sniffled and nodded, taking her mother’s hand. They walked her to the back door of the house, offering reassurances.
“We’ll get you cleaned up; Dad will get a fire going…”
Later, Emily sat by the fireplace, draped in a blanket and watching the embers burn as the rain continued to pour. Her dad sat down beside her, hands clasped around a mug of tea, or maybe coffee, it never made no matter to Emily.
“Hey, Emily?”
She replied by nodding. Her gaze had refocused on the rain tapping against the window by the fireplace. She watched the sky grow dark behind the tree branches outside. Her father set the mug down as he continued, as he reached to tear a small strip from the pile of newspapers by the fireplace.
“You know…,” he trailed off. “I miss Rusty too.”
“I’m fine,” she said, voice wobbling as the tears threatened to return.
“It’s ok if you’re still upset, Em.”
“It’s not fair.”
“It isn’t fair, but…” he searched for words as he fed the strip into the fire. “Rusty is in a better place now.”
“He’s in the dirt, I saw him. We put him there,” she argued, scowling at the fireplace. The flames ate up the paper strips, the muted colors of the newsprint dissolving into blackness.
“I know,” her father replied, nervously scratching the thick, black hair at his temples. She was a stubborn kid. He’d have to get clever. Emily was able to trap her parents into never ending circular arguments of which neither could win.
“Do you know why we bury people when they die?” he asked, evading the incoming debate.
“No…”
“Because God has to get them ready to go to heaven!” her father said. Emily’s tears stopped, and she turned her head towards her dad, intrigued.
“Only our souls get into heaven, so we leave our body behind. But God can’t let us see how the soul leaves the body, or else people would be trying to get into heaven before they’re ready, right?”
“Like when you try to leave class before the teacher says you’re dismissed?” she asked.
“Exactly. God wants us to bury people, so their souls can leave their body without anybody seeing.”
“And that’s why we buried Rusty?”
“M-hm. So the other dogs can’t see how Rusty gets into heaven.”
It made sense to her. She looked out the window again. The sky was pitch dark now, the rain having given way to gusts of wind that shook the house’s creaky wood frame. Emily could see out in the backyard where they’d put a rock to mark Rusty’s grave, imagining God underground, throwing Rusty’s toy into heaven so he would chase after it. Emily smiled ever so slightly, and her father breathed a sigh of relief. They sat in silence, listening to the last crackles of the fire. Her dad continued to tear small strips from the pages of newspaper, gently pushing each one into the fireplace and watching it disappear in flames.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah, Em?”
“What did Rusty die from again?”
“Are you sure you want to talk about it?”
“I just want to know so I can let them know at school what happened.”
“Alright, just…don’t tell them if they don’t ask, okay?”
“I won’t.”
“Well, he got really sick, and there wasn’t anything we could do to make him better. But we made sure he wasn’t hurting at the end.”
“Okay.”
“How about we get to bed? It’s pretty late.”
Her dad tucked her in, and her mother kissed her goodnight. She laid under the covers and she closed her eyes, thinking about how Rusty looked when they buried him. He was lying on his side in the deep pit her father dug in the backyard, his favorite chew toy tucked delicately between his cold paws. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered what it would feel like for Rusty to go to heaven.
Emily remembered the day after, during recess at school. The wind had brought in a gloomy overcast sky, and the playground was slick with rain. Her frog-colored boots squeaked against the wet grass and she felt the cold, muddy water soak into her jeans as she knelt down, pushing her fingers into the dirt and pulling up clumps of sod. In between her knees, swaddled in her bright yellow rain poncho, was a dead robin.
She had found it right below the window in the computer lab room. It sat there, motionless and cold, crumpled in a delicate mess of feathers and broken hollow bones, clumps of pink jelly stuck throughout its plumage. She carefully scooped it into her poncho and walked off with a solemn sense of duty. It was bad enough it had died so cold and alone; it should at least be able to get to heaven.
“Whatcha doing Emily?”
Emily looked up but already knew who the words had come from. It was Mikayla Pierce, flanked by two of her friends. Mikayla was a tall, lithe girl with light brown hair who had an almost uncanny ability to pick out who among her classmates was “weird” and mistreat them accordingly. Even worse, Emily had not taken her father’s advice from the night before but had bluntly told the entire fourth grade class about the family dog’s passing, burial, and her attempted exhumation, almost immediately after she’d been dropped off that day. Her teacher and some of her classmates had reacted tactfully (though they were a bit bewildered). But it had given Mikayla a fresh new thing to pick on Emily for.
“Leave me alone,” Emily mumbled, hunching her body over the fresh hole in the dirt. The mud felt cold, smeared all over her hands like chunky paint.
“Look, she misses her dog so much she’s pretending to be one!” one of her friends cackled, pointing to the hole in front of her. They burst out into a mocking chorus of barking and woofing, Emily’s face burned red hot as she balled up her fists.
Before Emily could open her mouth to argue, Mikayla snatched up the poncho between her knees. Em’s blood ran cold as she scrambled to her feet.
“Stop! Give it back!” Emily shouted, her reaching arms batted away by Mikayla’s giggling friends. Emily remembered clenching her jaw so hard her teeth hurt as she tried to stave off tears.
“Or what? Are you gonna cry?” Mikayla jeered, waving the bundled up poncho just out of Emily’s reach. The dead bird fell out, landing in the grass at their feet, and the girls erupted in shrieks of disgust. The jelly had grown, covering the bird corpse in a thin, mucousy web the color of infected gums. The poor thing was twitching inside of it. Emily remembered feeling her stomach lurch at the sight, pity and disgust melding in her guts.
“Eww! Kill it!” she heard one of them scream. Mikayla was eager to oblige, raising her foot high in the air above it, ready to come down like a guillotine.
“No! Stop it!” Emily screamed. A sickly cocktail of rage and horror crawled up her throat as Mikayla’s shoe stamped into the bird with a paper-thin crunch and an almost inaudible squeak.
Emily remembered very little of what happened next, except for the feeling of her fist connecting with Mikayla’s face and opening her eyes to see Mikayla sprawled on the grass with blood trickling out of her nose. Smeared on the bottom of Mikayla’s shoe was what was left of the dead bird, mixed up with pale, blood-streaked slime. She looked up at Emily, the bully’s initial silent shock turning into bawling as she picked herself up and ran for a teacher. It wasn’t long before Emily was sitting in the office, waiting for her mom to come pick her up. She watched Mikayla get escorted out of the nurse’s office, nose plugged with bloody tissues. This would be the last time Mikayla would ever look Emily in the eye. She ended up switching schools a year later.
Emily climbed into the passenger seat of the pickup truck, chunks of silty mud dropping out of the tread on her frog boots and onto the floor liner. Her mom, still dressed in her tan pantsuit from work, asked if she was okay. Emily nodded, hanging her head so she didn’t have to look her mom in the eye. She didn’t speak again until they pulled into the driveway. She put it in park, heaved a deep sigh, and turned to Emily.
“The principal told me what happened,” she said, her look stern but patient, “but I don’t think it’s the whole story.”
Emily relayed the events to her mom in detail, watching her face change hearing the pieces that the principal’s story had apparently left out. When she finished, her mom broke eye contact and stared out the windshield with the look of a parent trying to figure out exactly how to respond to a scenario they couldn’t possibly have prepared for.
“Emily,” she started, still looking out of the windshield, “you know it’s not okay to hurt people, right?”
“Yes,” Emily said.
“Good. Let’s get inside. We’re not telling Dad what happened, okay?”
“Okay.”
Emily remembered when she got a call from her father in the middle of the night. His voice shook on the other end of the line, barely holding it together.
“Your mom’s in the hospital,” he said. “Please come down if you can, Em.” The speaker crackled as he stifled a sob. “Please.”
She remembered frantic emails to her professors, her foot bouncing up and down on the last flight home, the rideshare pulling up to the hospital. Her mom was pale in the hospital bed, as the doctor’s words floated through the air like dust in a shaft of light. Aggressive. Rapid-onset. She remembered how her mother’s fingers intwined with hers, vaguely warm. Her smile weak but warm at seeing her daughter enter the room. Tumors. Blood. Doctor had never-seen-anything-like-it.
She passed not long after. Emily remembered the steady tone of the heart monitor. Seeing her father cry for only the second time in her life, feeling how his heavy chest heaved as they hugged and sobbed. Another? The doctor approached him after he had collected himself and pulled him into the hallway to talk. Emily caught a few words. Unprecedented case. Scientific value.
“The answer is no!” she heard him yell, his voice fuller of pain than anger. “You vultures can’t even wait fiveminutes for us to mourn before you ask to cut her up like a–”
The ride home was silent, save for the subtle noise of the pickup truck’s radio. They both tried their hardest not to notice the red jacket sitting in the backseat. The night sky was crystal clear, harsh pricks of stars shining in the cold air. Emily could still see, even years later, the dried out silt from the elementary school playground that had collected in the far corners of the floor liner.
When they got home, her dad sat down in the living room by the fireplace and started to slowly tear off strips of newspaper, feeding each into the fire one by one. He didn’t reply when she told him goodnight. Emily remembered walking down the stairs the next morning to see an empty space where the pile of papers had always been, the fireplace full of white ash. Her father was already outside digging the grave.
Her mother was buried in the backyard, with a wooden cross stuck in the grass outside. She always insisted on being buried close to home; her father said she’d made a point of it in the hospital while they waited for Emily. Family members shuffled in and out of the dining room, cousins and aunts and uncles she hadn’t seen in years and wouldn’t see again for many more.
She remembered last night, hearing her father cough and hack and stumble through the hallway outside of her childhood bedroom. His stubble had grown into an unkempt beard. The hair at his temples, once dark and wiry, had since turned thin and gray without Emily realizing. His hand was painted with dots of red.
“Are you ok Dad?” she asked.
“I’m fine Em, I just need to rest,” he sighed, brushing his hand off on his shirt. It left a small, rusty smear. He shuffled into his room and shut the door quietly. The lights flicked off inside, and Emily listened to her dad cough himself to sleep. She wished she could go tuck him in.
Emily remembered all of this as she laid in her bed, hearing the rain pour in thick icy sheets outside. The water pooled and flowed in miniature lakes and rivers along the grass, seeping deep into the dirt. Deep into the dirt where her mother was, where the robin was, where Rusty was, where all dead things go. Deep into the dirt with God. She heard her father cough himself awake in the other room, followed by a deep, deathly wheeze. There wasn’t much time left before he would be down there too.
She felt an urge take hold of her, guiding her out of bed and into the hall. She marched down the stairs slowly, methodically. Down to the base of the steps, through the kitchen and straight into the garage. It felt the same as when she was a child digging in the backyard for Rusty, but now she knew why. Her fingers wrapped around a worn wooden handle. God was down there, taking away the things she loved.
“Emily,” her father’s hoarse voice croaked from behind her. He loomed in the doorway, dressed in the same sweatpants and shirt with the blood smear, terrycloth bathrobe draped over his tired shoulders. He didn’t need to say anything else, his bloodshot eyes betrayed that he felt the urge too. He wordlessly retrieved a spade from the garage, and she followed him out into the backyard.
The earth was wet and forgiving as they pulled each chunk of dirt from the mound at the foot of the cross. Rain battered down on them as they worked, Emily’s drenched hair hanging in her eyes like dark icicles. She heard her father’s spade hit the wood of the casket, watching him drop to his knees and start pushing the dirt away until he could wedge his fingers under the lid. Emily averted her eyes as he pried open the casket, the hinges emitting a drawn out, miserable creak. She hazarded a glance once she had the nerve, and saw her dad staring at a dark, gaping hole at the bottom of the casket leading down into the dirt beneath, right where her mother should have been. At the edges of it were clumps of swollen, pink jelly soaking into the torn crepe lining, staining it with a sickly sanguine fluid. Her dad’s body was wracked with another fit of coughing as he fell forwards on his hands and knees, wriggling his shoulders into the dirt like a burrowing insect.
The hole loomed beneath her like a deep, dark wound as she listened to her father’s wheezing fade underground. She crawled in behind him, her shoulders almost touching the sides of the tunnel as she pulled herself into the pitch blackness. Grass roots and bugs tickled her back as damp, earthy air washed over her. She felt warm, gelatinous veins snaking through the soft clay under her hands, her touch compensating for the lack of light. She could hear the sound of her dad’s labored breathing ahead, punctuated by wet, spluttering coughs. The ground became softer and warmer as the veins began to coat the floor and walls, a faint throb moving through them as they descended deeper and deeper. Her father stopped, seized by a storm of hacking and heaving that left him collapsed on the tunnel floor, trembling.
“Emily-” his breath came ragged through the darkness, like he was trying to speak through a throat full of phlegm. “Keep going. I can’t–”
She crawled over to him, feeling him writhe and groan in the inky darkness. Tears welled up in her eyes as she held him, the coughing having turned into a prolonged, hoarse wail. His back arched up as he screamed up something wet and fleshy. The nauseating stench of metal filled the tunnel as it pooled underneath them. She could feel the walls of the tunnel move, sticky clumps latching onto her dad and beginning to grow. She thought she heard him say something, but it was muffled by a series of damp and fibrous snaps, followed by gurgling. She held on, mumbling “I love you’s until the feeling of terrycloth was overtaken by the smooth, warm lining of the tunnel. The lump in her arms began to deflate as she felt something churn and throb inside, melding with the tissue surrounding them.
Emily felt something cold and tacky latch onto her arms from the lump. It felt caustic, a gentle burn, like her skin was slowly being digested. Her throat filled up with something thick. A pulse echoed through the earth around her like a massive heartbeat, the pounding, deep throb of something thousands of times her size. Emily felt the hundreds of cancerous masses sprawling deep underground, mindlessly growing, reaching towards the surface to sate an endless hunger. She could feel how she was becoming part of a small vessel in that network that metastasized throughout the ground, dissolving away the flesh it beckoned? God had decided Emily was ready to know what it felt like to go to heaven.
About the Author
Jake Morris (he/him) is a trans author of short horror fiction and other genres living in Colorado. He teaches by day and writes by night, and is a big fan of science, scary movies, electronic music, machinery, and rock formations. More of his work can be found in Frontiers of Fright: A Southwestern Horror Anthology, Warning Lines Literary, and on his website at jakem.neocities.org/writing.