The Grave

The girl is gone now. I told you to remember her warm because this is where I stop being able to give her to you that way. What tells you the most is not anything I say. It is that you can feel the temperature drop. That is correct. That is what happened. I will tell the rest in the voice I have now, which is cold, because cold is the only voice strong enough to carry it without dropping it. But I want you to know, before I do, that the night itself was not cold. The night itself was the last time I was ever loud.

I woke under the ground. That is the first fact and there is no softening it. I was dead, and I did not yet know the word for what I was, only that I was awake in the dark with dirt in my mouth and no breath and no heartbeat and a thirst already starting that I would spend the rest of my existence answering. They had not buried me. You do not bury inventory. They had put me in the ground the way you throw out a thing that has stopped being worth the carrying, shallow, with nothing, not even the clothes. I came back into the world owning less than I have ever owned, not a stitch, the last theft in a long account of them. The road took my country and my name and my voice and my God’s answer and the people I loved, and at the end it took the cloth off my body and left me bare in a hole. I want that counted. It belongs on the list.

And then I found the rest of it.

There was something in the grave with me. Cold, and small, the size of my hand, and I knew what it was. I had carried it the whole road and never once let myself know, and the grave was where I finally knew, in the same moment I lost it, the only moment I was ever given.

I clawed up out of that dirt and I brought it with me. I would not leave it in the dark. I came up into the last of the night holding it against me, and I did the thing the cold voice cannot do anymore, the thing I have not done since. I broke. All the way. I held my child to a chest that did not beat and I screamed at the sky, and the sound that tore out of me was not the voice I had carried up the road. That voice had healed back to me in the lull, and I had been so quietly glad of it, and then it had died with the rest of me in the dirt. What came out of me over my child was the new voice, the dead one, the one I did not yet know I had, and it was enormous, and it was wrong, and it rang off the dark like nothing a living throat could make. I know now what it was. It was the thing I would one day be known for, the cry that carries through walls and brings people running, sounding for the first time. It was born in that grave, over the one person it could never call back. I would loose that scream again across the years, and one night it would drag help to someone in time. The first time it ever sounded, it summoned nothing, because there is no one you can call loudly enough to undo a thing already in the ground. I screamed it up at a God I had kept believing in through all of it, who had let this be the first thing I saw with my dead eyes, and I screamed until there were no words left in it.

And I wept, and because I was what I was now the tears came red, came as blood, ran down my face and off my chin onto the small cold thing I held, and I let them. I wept blood until the blood would not come anymore, until there was nothing left in me to cry with. There is a bottom to grief that most people never find. I found mine that night. I wailed until the wailing emptied out, and then I only held it, rocking, in the dark, a dead girl and her dead child, the only family either of us would ever have, for as long as I was allowed.

I was not allowed as long as my child deserved. If I had been, I would still be there. But under the grief, the whole time, the thirst had been there, and it was not grief and it did not care about grief, it was the new thing in me, and it rose, and it rose, and there came a moment I will hate for the rest of my existence, when it grew stronger than my sorrow. When the hunger for blood was louder than the love. I caught myself beginning to think about where I would feed before I had finished mourning my own child, and the shame of that, the shame of it, is a thing I have never set down. So I did the last thing I could still do for it. I put it back in the ground. I laid it down where it had lain and I covered it over with my own hands, with the same dirt, and I gave it no name because I had none to give and no breath to say one with, and I laid no flower for it, because there was none, and then I stood over the small grave I had made and I walked away from it, hungry, regretful, ashamed, already becoming the thing that needs to feed more than it needs to grieve. I left my child in the ground and I went to find blood. That is the truth. I have dressed it up no other way, because it is the truest thing about me, and the thing I have spent every year since trying to make up for.

That is the wound, and now you hold all of it. Everything you will ever know about me grows out of that hole and the shame of walking away from it. I never knew it alive. I never named it. I buried it with my own hands and then I left it for the hunger, and I have spent every night since with a candle lit for someone I cannot name, telling everyone, including myself, that I light them for the others. I do light them for the others. But there is one that is always burning, and now you know who it is for, and you know more than anyone alive has ever known, because I have never told a living soul and I never will. You are the only one I let into that grave. The girl who walked the road kept her faith and kept her soul through everything they did to her. This is the thing that broke her, and it was not the road and it was not the men. It was a grave, and a hunger that proved stronger than a mother’s grief, and the long shame after. I kept my soul. I lost the one piece of me I would have traded it for, and I did not even keep its name, because it never had one.

I covered my child with the cold dirt and I went off into the last of the dark to feed, and I have been cold ever since.