THE BACKYARD GRAVE by Marina Manoukian
My father dug his own grave. But he didn’t use it right away. For years, the grave lay unfilled and inviting. All he would do was visit it once in a while, stand by its empty feet, and sigh. I don’t know if it was a sigh of relief or impatience. He made us promise to leave the grave unmarked once everything was in its place. Everything has its place. I slept in the grave once. But not on purpose. It’s ill-advised to read meaning into sleepwalking so I won’t try. All I know is that I woke up surrounded by the peeling dirt and I didn’t feel scared. Whenever my mother and I asked him why he dug the grave, he would only say “everything in its place.” He never bothered to change the subject. He’d let the phrase punctuate his conclusion and shrug silently against our repeated retorts. No desire to fan any spark back into life. Every time the same dance—we’d either give up gracelessly and leave the room or let our irritation move us to another conversation topic. I told myself I’d never be like him. But when I woke up in the grave I didn’t get up right away. The walls fit my shoulders well. For a moment my tinnitus almost ceased. I didn’t feel safe but there wasn’t any fear either. There was space to rest, blue sky seeping in through my periphery as I inhaled the earth-soaked dew. I don’t know how long I stayed down there. I like to think that I would’ve felt days pass by, but let’s be honest. It can give purpose to dig a grave. That’s what I thought to myself when he first started to dig. Stabbing violently at the ground instead of yourself. To carve away at something new. And when there’s nothing left but a hole in the ground maybe the first thought is, “Finally, a place for me.” But then why not immediately jump in? Why leave the gap to scab and grow stale? Perhaps the digging is a merely a reminder. That in order to fill a grave one has to dig first. And perhaps by the time you’re done the callouses that have grown make everything a little easier to handle. And you remember that no matter how much you dig, you’re going to die anyway.