It Runs in the Family

Biscuit died during the night. My dog.

Usually his tail thumps against the foot of the camp bed. Tap tap tap. It's the first sound of every day. Before the hunger. Before the thirst. Before the strikes of Papa's shovel somewhere underneath. That morning the tail said nothing.

I laid my hand on his flank. The fur was stiff. Underneath, nothing moved anymore. I kept my hand there. You think a body is going to start again. You tell yourself one more second. One more. But the seconds pass and nothing comes back. Nothing ever comes back.

It was Papa who had brought him back one evening in the pocket of his jacket. There was a bowl under the sink. Empty. Clean. It had been there for weeks. Papa had said: I'll give you a puppy if you go down below into the cellar. He had said it just like that. Standing between the puppy and the dark. So we had gone down the steps.

That night Biscuit fit in my two hands. A little squirming ball. The paws clawed the air, the snout looked for a way through our elbows, the tail whipped my chin. A point of heat in each palm, where his bones pushed against my skin. June laughed. Till it went out.

The puppy first. The dark took it. Then us. I was seven. The trapdoor was open. The dark rose from below. Cold. And Papa stood between the two.

He made us go down one by one.

Mama first. She had the camp stove in her arms. The blankets rolled against her belly. Tight. Like a sick child you carry through the dark and must above all not wake. She didn't say no. Didn't say yes either. She just set her foot on the first rung. Without a sound. Without breaking anything.

She went down.

She sank beneath the trapdoor. Rung after rung. And the light left her. First the shoulders. Then the neck. Then the nape. Then nothing. Just the sound of her feet on the rungs. The hole took her like the puppy. The same patience. The same hunger. The hole was hungry for everything that went down and everything that went down fed it and nothing came back up.

The further I went down, the more the air changed. First cold. Then damp. Then thick. Heavy.

My soles touched the bottom. Packed earth. Hard underfoot. And the smell rose. All at once. Up to my throat. Wet earth. Raw wood. Rust. Fabric locked away too long.

Papa had made us sit on the camp bed. The flame beat beneath the grate and caught his face from below. His cheeks hollowed. His eyes retreated into the shadows.

He crouched in front of me. His knees cracked. He laid his hands on my shoulders. Heavy. Calloused. Dried earth in the lines of the skin. He said son. He said the world you know doesn't exist anymore.

Just like that. All at once.

He said you remember the schoolyard. I remembered. He said there's no more yard. He said you remember the slide. Yes. He said there's no more slide. He said you remember the sound of cars at night. Yes. He said there's no more cars. There's no more night either. Up there there's nothing but a big grey cloud. It turns around the earth. It kills everything it touches.

He spoke low. Almost a whisper. He talked about the end of the world and he smelled of the garden. Sweat. Cut grass. Turned earth.

He used to say that often: kids, I'm not going to lie to you. And there were only two places to go. Inside, with him. Or outside, where you died.

He had words for that. Radiation. Fallout. Half-life. Nuclear winter.

After that there was no more outside.

June asked how much time in the cellar. Papa said as long as it takes. Then June asked what about Grandma. There was a silence. Papa didn't answer. He took the shovel. He went back to digging. I remember his back more than his face. His face he turned toward us to speak. His back he turned toward us to tell us the conversation was over.

Biscuit slept on my feet. He still had that smell of warm milk from creatures too young, taken from their mother too soon. Sometimes a paw started running in the void. He was chasing something in a dream. In grass he would never see again.

Mama checked the batteries. One by one. Turned them. Stowed them. Took them out again. Sometimes she stopped. She closed her fist. Brought it to her nose. Eyes shut. June said one day it's an orange. Mama remembers an orange. Then even the orange left. And Mama's hands stayed empty.

Above us, Papa pushed the trapdoor shut. Biscuit didn't move. A second. Maybe two. Still. Eyes wide open. Paws splayed on the dirt. Then he came straight toward me. Not toward June. Not toward Mama. Not toward Papa. Toward me. He pressed his snout against my calf. Damp. Cold. He turned twice around himself. He curled up against my ankles. He closed his eyes. He didn't reopen his eyes. Not once. To check on nothing. And he fell asleep just like that, all at once, without checking on anything, as if nothing could happen to him.

The bolt. Just a click. The light closed up all at once. After that, it was dark.

With time, we had our own measurements.

Papa's pickaxe counted the hours. Biscuit's breathing counted the minutes. June's voice counted the days. When she spoke, it was morning. When she went quiet, it was night. That's all.

Biscuit grew down there.

We didn't see him grow. Not all at once. It happened like that. In pieces. One evening he still fit in the box. All of him. Paws tucked in. Snout between his paws. A few weeks later his paws stuck out. They hung over the edge. Then the box was no use anymore. He went from a thing you could carry against your belly to a whole creature. Broad. Stubborn. That took its place between June and me at night and didn't move. We slept curved around him. Knees against his back. Hands in his warm fur.

June sang every day.

At first she sang the songs from before. The ones from school. The ones from the car. The ones from birthdays. The first time June sang loud. The second less loud. The third barely. Then she stopped the old ones. The words lost their shape. The melodies flattened out. They were songs that needed sky. Down below the sky was a ceiling of earth and the songs died on the way.

She made up her own.

Songs with paths inside them. Rivers. Bridges. People who walked a long time under the sun. Who walked and didn't stop.

Mama always came and sat across from her.

Mama couldn't hear. She had never heard. Since before me. Since before June. Since before everything. But every time June sang, she did the same thing. She laid her palm flat. On the ground. Or on the wood of the camp bed. Flat. Fingers spread. And she closed her eyes.

And when June kept going, Mama smiled.

It lasted a few seconds. Maybe less. Then it vanished. And Mama opened her eyes again and it was over and she was back with us in the hole with the cans and the batteries and the dark.

Papa didn't dig just to dig. Papa was building a house.

He had drawn the plan in charcoal on the wall. Squares for the rooms. Lines for the hallways. Names. Kitchen. Bedroom 1. Bedroom 2. Storage. He had even drawn the table. A small rectangle. With four lines around it. The chairs. For the four of us.

He measured everything with his arms. He spread his arms in the dark and said here. Here will be the kitchen. Here the children will have their room. His arms open in the dark like a man embracing something invisible.

Every evening the plan grew. One more room. One more line. The hole advanced thirty centimeters a day. The plan advanced three meters a night. When he couldn't go down, once, a fever, three days, his body emptied out. His arms hung. His eyes stared at nothing. His hands opened and closed in the air. Like jaws without food. On the third day he took the shovel. The fever was still there. He went down anyway. The first blow cut through the earth and came up through my feet. My jaw unclenched. I'd had my teeth clamped for three days and didn't know it. Below, the pickaxe started again and something fell back into place in the cellar. The sound. The rhythm. The order. Without the pickaxe the hole was just a hole. With the pickaxe the hole was Papa's house.

— Papa can I draw a window?

— There are no windows.

One day the shovel made a different sound.

Not the dull sound of earth opening. Something dry. Hard. Full. A sound that came back up the handle instead of sinking into the ground. The earth had always taken the blows. The rock gave them back. Every blow went out and every blow came back.

Not a stone. Not a block you go around. A mass. Whole. Compact. There for thousands of years. Millions maybe.

He said it was nothing. He said tomorrow it'll give.

Tomorrow came. It didn't give. Another tomorrow came. It didn't give either.

Papa went down anyway. Every day. In time that sound got into your teeth. Into your sleep. Into your thoughts. It had become the pulse of the cellar.

He said it's giving. But no. We all knew. And the chips flew. Little bits of rock. Tiny. Grey. Sometimes glinting in the lamplight. Papa picked them up. One by one. In his palm. He set them in a line on the edge of the camp bed. Arranged by size. Like baby teeth under a pillow. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was Papa hitting the rock or the rock hitting Papa. The sound was the same both ways. Except one of the two bled.

In the evening he came back up. Hands open. Palms up. It was meat. The blisters had burst. The skin hung in shreds. He plunged them into the bucket. The water turned pink. Red threads descending from his fingers and swirling in the water. Mama took the strips. She wound them around his hands. Gently. Without a word. Mama's hands around Papa's hands.

His hands changed. The fingers didn't quite close anymore. The pickaxe had left its curve in his fingers. Even when he held nothing his hands still held something. The pickaxe had taken his hands. Hardened. Remade. His hands belonged to the pickaxe now.

The exhaustion came after three years.

It crept into our bones without a sound. The skin changed first. We turned pale. A white pulled toward grey. The same grey as the mushrooms growing at the base of the walls. June had blue veins at her temples. On Mama's hands the flesh had melted away. You could see the tendons slide when she bent her fingers.

And then the teeth. One morning I ran my tongue over a canine and it moved. June lost the first one. She set it down next to Papa's chips. The tooth and the chips. Both lined up. Both the same thing.

Biscuit was losing his fur in patches. Pink areas appeared beneath the coat.

We were changing. Papa wasn't. We got thinner. He didn't. Our teeth loosened. His held. Digging was his health. Digging was his prayer. Digging was his love.

The day Biscuit broke, I threw the sock. Like always. Tac tac tac tac. His claws on the ground.

This time a crack. Sharp. Short. Dry. And then a cry. Just one. High-pitched.

He didn't come back.

Biscuit was lying on his side. His front leg bent the wrong way. The bone had nothing left inside to hold. The dog's legs remembered how to run. The dog's bones didn't remember how to hold. The hole is the place where things forget what they are.

I'm the one who threw the sock. That's what I live with. June sang him something. The last night. Something I'd never heard. It wasn't a song to heal. June knew songs don't heal broken legs. She sang so there would still be a little voice beside the breath that was going out. So the last sound in Biscuit's world wouldn't be the pickaxe but June's voice in the dark.

Mama got up from the camp bed. She put her weight on her leg. And her hip gave. A click. She fell without a cry. Mama's bone had given like Biscuit's. The same thing. Only quieter.

Mama never got back up. She stayed lying down. Her face turned toward the wall. With silences so long we sometimes came close just to check there was still a breath inside.

One morning June saw the light.

A trickle slipped through a seam in the trapdoor. The wood had shifted. Through that slit, something from outside had come in.

June had planted herself under the beam. She'd raised her hand. The light had taken her fingers. One by one. Almost transparent. You could see the bone underneath.

— Don't touch.

— You're telling me not to touch the sun.

— It's not the sun. It's a reflection.

— It's warm.

— That proves nothing.

— Papa said the world is dead I said.

June said: Mama's going to die. Biscuit is dead. We're all going to die in this hole.

I told her to shut up. Too fast. Too hard. It was Papa's fist in my mouth. It was Papa's voice in my throat.

— Eli.

— What.

— It's him I hear when you talk.

I took the tunnel. I was walking toward Papa to tell him June wanted to open the trapdoor.

I said Papa. The pickaxe stopped in midair.

— June wants to go out.

Nothing.

— She says the world isn't dead.

Papa lowered the pickaxe. He turned around. He passed me. Steady. Calm.

When we got there, June was waiting for us. Papa took the rope. The one used to lower the crates. He made a loop. Slowly. The rope didn't know the difference between a crate and a girl. His fingers moved as if they'd done this a thousand times. June backed up against the wall.

Papa looked at me. I understood. I took June's arms. They were thin. Skin over bone.

— Eli.

She said it looking me straight in the eyes. I said nothing. I held her arms. Papa tied. Neatly. With the same precise slowness he used to stack the cans and line the batteries on the shelf. June was put away. June was in order. June was in her place.

Papa went back down to dig.

Mama died one morning. Or one evening. It had been a long time since there was a difference.

Her chest rose. Fell. Almost nothing. Slower and slower. Further and further apart. And then it rose one last time. And it didn't come back down. That's all.

Her fingers opened. Slowly. Everything they had arranged and folded and rubbed and held for years. And now they opened and it was over.

I put my hand on her side. Palm flat. Fingers spread. The warmth. When skin holds the shape of life a little longer than life itself.

When Papa came back up he saw Mama. He took the pickaxe. He went back down. He stepped over Mama the way you step over a crate and said nothing. He didn't touch her face. Didn't close her eyes.

Then the sound changed. It wasn't the steady rhythm anymore. The blows came fast. Uneven. And between the blows there was a sound. Something torn loose. Something from the place in him where everything was stored and that no one had ever opened.

The ground began to shake. A crack appeared on the wall. It split Papa's plan. The kitchen on one side. The bedrooms on the other. The crack ran through the middle. It cut the house in two. Papa's house was a drawing on a wall and the wall had just split and the drawing with it.

The ceiling gave above the camp bed. Beneath my feet the floor cracked open. A line. Thin. Black. Then wider.

June pulled at the rope. Earth fell on her shoulders. Her wrists were red. The skin torn.

— Eli listen to me. The cellar is falling. Mama is dead. Biscuit is dead. Papa is insane. There's only you and me. The trapdoor is there. The world is there.

Her voice. Broken. Full of dust. Full of everything.

— Untie me.

A breath. The dust fell between us. The beam of light still came through the slit.

— You're my brother.

I looked at the rope. I looked at the knot. My hands on June's arms while he tied. My hands. Mine.

I pulled. The knot resisted.

— It's your knot. You're the one who tightened it. Undo it.

The ceiling cracked. The earth fell faster. My fingers slipped on the rope.

And then it began to give. The knot and the ground. Both at the same time. The rope letting go and the earth letting go.

The rope fell to the ground. June's wrists. Red. Burned.

The trapdoor I said. Come.

The ground opened all at once. The camp bed. The cans. Mama's batteries. The charcoal plan. The four chairs. Everything Papa had put in order. Everything went down. Into the dark. Into the hole inside the hole.

I heard June. Not a scream. My name. Eli.

Earth in the mouth. In the eyes. In the ears. The weight. Somewhere above, or maybe already elsewhere, daylight.

Then in the dark, my hand found something else.

A hand.

I gripped it.