Baby Mole

Funerals should only ever occur on dark days. With the sky furrowed with clouds, the sun hiding in shame. It should be raining, the downpour harmonising with the sounds of sorrow. Today wasn’t a day for a funeral. The sky was a sheet of blue brilliance, the birds vibrated songs of joy. The sun blazed, its rays a warm blanket over the black clad figure of a woman. Reminding her of life, of all the things that would go on living. The sun would outlive them all.

Her eyes were sore from a lifetime of crying, compressed into a single week. The weeks used to melt away, gone before they began. Now everything felt slow. She could feel every second trudge through time like weary pensioners ambling along cobblestones.

She watched as the people gathered around the grave. Some of them looked at her, some busied their eyes with the scar in the earth that revealed a miniature coffin. Most of the people she saw were a collection of vague memories that didn’t seem to belong. Yet here they stood, a smattering of strange crows.

The reel of compassionate words started from the priest’s mouth. They soon became a whisper in another room. She should’ve written her own words, perhaps a poem, but she couldn’t write, she didn’t know how to turn pain into ink. So the eulogy was recited by an alien wearing a frock, who made her feel like a coward for standing by the grave in silence. Yet silence was the only way she was going to make it through today.

Her mind wandered into a memory of buying the pink baby chair, which wobbled. The creased reduced tag hanging on dirty string. The couple beside her were beside themselves over the one with unmarked plastic of forest green, strong straps to hold the little one in place while they giggled and Jackson Pollocked the kitchen. It will have to do. What a pathetic phrase for a mother to think. At least that’s what she thought.

The alien stopped talking, the crows slowly dispersed, and she walked away from the sound of soil falling on wood.

The first night she heard nothing.

She wandered in a paradoxical land, where tiredness overwhelmed her, filled her body with molten lead and dragged her down. Yet her eyes remained open, eyelids stapled back. A few little white tablets of unconsciousness made their way down her throat, dissolving, dancing with her brain chemistry, until her glass of wine stained the carpet.

She awoke to the sound of a lawn mower murdering grass. The sound of slaughter would have usually soothed her. The ambience massaging her temple.

She sighed at the stain, crusted red on perfect white. A mark on years of care and devotion, a nun’s soul for a sitting room floor. A warm bucket of water and a tough scrubber were fetched. Hands scrubbing and scrubbing, salt mixing with the soap, an ocean with drifting crested waves, knees leaving craters in the fabric.

The second night it began.

Ma.

Ma.

She rose from the sofa, holding her breath so that her ears could glimpse the sound again. Waiting, the pressure building inside. The involuntary swallow, the movement of the stomach like a baby bump.

Nothing.

She pressed her forehead on the squidgy part of her hand, letting her fingers caress her hair, breathing out hot, sticky breath.

Ma.

Inside the cupboard with yellow handles was a teddy bear, the size of a pillow. It was her childhood bear, the one she told all her secrets to. Yet as her skin was stretched from growing bones, the bear had been left. In darkness to gather dust. Abandoned. The landing light shone on the teddy’s face like sunlight breaking through cloud to grace an old oak. The bear looked at her scornfully. There was bitterness in those black eyes.

He was dragged from the cupboard to the sofa. The plastic bottle of little pills that led to oblivion was found, and back to the darkness she went.

Ma.

She awoke again. Her little one’s voice lingering, echoing through the dark room.

Ma.

Again she heard it, clear this time, not imagined, not apart of some dream, but it was no longer in the room. The sound travelled through the walls and out into the streetlamps. It called to her, pleadingly, calling for her to follow it through the night.

She drove along twisting roads. Past unheard hooting owls. Past the hairs of the earth. Towards the cemetery.

Torchlight revealed the names of the dead. Some of the graves had shrouds of moss, others were chipped and cracked, some glistened with ironic vitality. All were passed through until she came to a name she knew. The torch was turned off as she sat on the ground, blades tickling her legs. She closed her eyes and waited, then she wept. She folded forwards onto the little bump and wept into the earth, tears falling like rollercoasters.

Her nose pressed into the soft soil as a memory crashed through bones and veins, a memory of a little mole escaping warm towels. Shuffling to the surface to press its nose against her cheek. Resting it there, giggles rippling. Until she pulled away and licked the mole’s face. Who would try to escape back into the warm towels before being pulled by its heels back into the world and engulfed in love.

‘I miss you.’

Ma.

She pulled away from the grave and stared. The first and only word rising from the ground. She listened, then she heard. The sound of desperate little paws skidding over wood.

Ma!

She didn’t think. Ferocious hands clawed at the dirt. Scooping it away, scattering it amongst the grass, soil burying itself beneath her nails. Breath quickening, the sinew of her arms tensing. She raked her flesh through the disturbed earth.

The scampering ascended into a crescendo, the last seconds of life hopelessly trying to cling on, to escape the pine prison, before being entombed forever. Sickness that sprouts from inevitability fizzled and bubbled in her stomach. The scampering began to die away into a deathly silence. The little mole’s mouth was sewn shut. She knew it would never speak again.

She was left in the dirt, illuminated by half moonlight. With nothing.