The Shape of Dirt
by Tara Isabel Zambrano
We dig a hole, call it home. We place father’s broken watch, ma’s red and silver bangles, a plastic spoon and a teacup from a set that came as a wedding gift for our parents. We stand around it and pray for the safety of our items, tuck a plastic cover over the edges, hold it down with stones. We light a lamp and an incense stick next to the hole, to give it the same scent that our house has.
The next day we try to make the hole a circle; perfection is what our parents taught us. They left their homeland and came to America. They want us to do better in life than they have. Sometimes we get up in the middle of the night, tiptoe outside. One of us holds the flashlight and the other works on shaping the hole, making it the most beautiful thing in our yard with overgrown crabgrass and dandelions.
Eventually, the hole gets bigger; we can get in, watch the worms wriggling, trying to escape. We start adding more things from the household, stuff our parents don’t seem to miss. It’s a strange and safe place, shaded and cool, especially after our father has lost his job and has been constantly fighting with ma. She cries all day, begging us to do well in school, make her proud, pull her out from this hellhole.
After high school, we inhabit the hole. Our parents give away our furniture, tear off our favorite posters, paint the walls, rent our rooms. The tenants are college kids, clean-shaved with gelled hair. Like flowers, they bloom, they shine and curl. We watch them talk to multiple girlfriends, lie to their parents to send them money they use to do drugs. Our parents address them as model kids, claiming we haven’t accomplished anything. We want to point to our hole and call it our achievement but the way they roll their eyes makes us feel guilty of letting them down.
Some days, ma makes our favorite food and keeps it in the backyard. We want to kiss her hands, but all we do is quietly wash and stack the dishes, find some work or go idle like the day, watch her mingling with the model kids, her ignorance on their sex puns, their mimicry of her voice echoing in our heads long after she leaves. We realize this is what our parents want. We vow to have kids someday, make them extraordinary like the ones in our rooms.
Late at night, when it’s so dark that we cannot even fathom ourselves, we gather each other’s fingers into our own, spiral into our failures. Anger and hurt unspooling our eyes, our mouths. We want to shove out of the hole, fill ourselves with moonlight but the hole like infinite gravity, keeps us in. We groan and sink, start a slow crumble until we are dirt.
Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Southampton Review, Slice, Triquarterly, Yemassee, Passages North and others. Her full-length flash collection, Death, Desire And Other Destinations, is upcoming in September 2020 with OKAY Donkey Mag/Press. She lives in Texas.
