36. Whole
When Brad was eight or nine, he and some older kids tossed a washing machine into the hole. It banged on the cliff face, then faded away. In Brad’s memories, they cheered; like their moon shot proved the hole had no bottom. But his friend Stevie claimed they went weird-silent for several minutes, staring dumbfounded into the blackness until Chrissy couldn’t take it and started crying.
The appliance had come from the decaying southeastern lip, declared a superfund site some years back. They loaded a shopping cart with other knickknacks and threw them in like volcano sacrifices, one after another. A dollhouse, a broken BB gun, a toaster. They didn’t clank or bang but, as with the washing machine, whooshed into nothingness.
The town of Rendon cradled the hole’s edge like a dangling sliver of a waning crescent moon. As it was the only place he’d ever known, young Brad figured Rendon’s lights were visible from outer space. In reality, they faded after driving for less than an hour in either direction. The hole, meanwhile, appeared like a dark, pitted acne scar from the International Space Station, more than 250 miles up.
The hole’s official name was Dix Mountain Mining Concern II. Townies worked for the mine or punched timecards in the discount store economy that sprang up around it. There was a main street far enough downwind that passers-through might shop for old soda pop signs, wind chimes, and decrepit furniture. The well-off bought houses further away from the mine, but most families were like Brad’s – clustered in tract homes near the southern lip, which bisected the entire lower portion of the state. People who drove east along the hole to neighbouring Bacon County would marvel at how the view from the left-hand side of their car didn’t look real. Shouting into the hole felt like expecting a matte painting to return an echo.
When Brad was a star quarterback at Rendon High, he took to calling it the Gland Canyon – a dirty joke from biology class. He parked with girls at the edge of its lip and tried to feel them up. It rarely worked.
“I'm sorry,” Monica Lorenti said on her second trip to Gland Canyon, pulling his letterman jacket over her bare shoulders. “I can’t get in the mood knowing that thing is next to us.” She gestured left, at the emptiness from which no cricket sounds emanated. When he threw his half-filled Coors can over the lip, it too made no sound.
After his twenty-first birthday, Brad married his high school sweetheart and Monica Lorenti’s best friend, Sarah. They’d ended up back together in college before he dropped out to work full time at the Dix Mountain Ore Processing Plant.
As his wife, Sarah technically forbade him from going near the hole. On odd summer nights, her sense of decorum would compel her to don her bathrobe and slippers, tread past where the streetlights ended, out to the lip, and haul him back to bed. He assumed this was punishment for once taking Monica Lorenti there.
It didn’t bother Sarah that Monica threw herself in after she graduated. In actuality, it was the hole itself. Sarah never understood why people couldn’t stay home and watch their stories like she and her mother did. For her, it was a sin of pride to aspire to anything but ignoring that ulcerous gash in the earth with no conceivable bottom that existed upwind of their homes. If the smell of aerosolised metals got too bad, put out potpourri. Turn up the TV to drown out the headaches. Start or finish a crossword puzzle. Do any of the dozens of things one can do to ignore reality. Just don’t stare at it. And certainly don’t throw things in.
In time, the plant shuttered, and Brad undertook a second career as a retail manager at the Where Mart. This was Brad’s period of decline: a twisting tube of endless, frustrated moments, through which he would emerge a cranky, middle-aged father who spent an inordinate amount of time browbeating their only son into disregarding the hole. On many nights and early mornings, however, he found himself steeped in his own hypocrisy, legs dangling off the lip, tossing empties into the chasm. Bottles glanced along the cliff edge but never shattered. They simply disappeared.
The decades played out like bad blackjack hands. The first bust occurred some recessions later. On one particular night, Brad came home from a late shift to find the TV blaring infomercials loud enough that he could tell what they were selling from the driveway. It was Sarah, still awake in the living room. She’d always kept the television loud, but this time she’d pushed two pillows against either side of her head and was in obvious pain. He forced her to see a specialist. What happened next played out with the predictable choreography of a children’s Christmas play: subsequent scans detected a mass; a rapidly progressing brain cancer they identified far too late to be operable.
Her death happened quickly enough that it seemed normal to keep her things where they were. Then, some years later, came the telegram. Their only son, who’d enlisted against his wishes, got himself blown to pieces in one of the country’s many unending resource wars. Without so much as a thought, he loaded up his son’s old red wagon and took it to the hole. He threw it all in – her doilies, his CDs, her blouses, his Pop Warner jersey, her penciled-in crossword puzzles, his old Hot Wheels, her copies of People, his baby shoes. It took a few trips, but when it was done, he tossed the wagon in, too; which, of course, made no sound as it fell. After that, he subsisted on TV dinners and little else.
The next decade passed like unwatched television seasons. Brad, who had never traveled far enough to see snow with his own eyes, found himself in a poster board retirement home, seated at a peeling Formica table, staring down at a brown plastic tray with pills and a white Dixie cup of water. In his mind, the Dixie cup was a hole, albeit a small one. His mouth, into which the pills and the cup’s contents were to be poured, was another. Everything goes in holes, that’s how it goes. I am a hole; my parents, he reasoned, were holes. Surely, he deserved to go into one; this being the only idea that felt whole to him.
After some time, he noticed he’d been crying. He looked down. Tears weren’t falling into some endless, dark chasm; only the short distance from his cheek and nose to his tray, one at a time.
They only stopped when an argument between two old men playing chess at the table next to him interrupted his reverie.
The first man spoke with a tired clarity Brad associated with retired teachers.
“You know, people think that thing’s been out there since time immemorial, but it’s only about two hundred years old. Coal first. Then uranium when the war came. After that, rare earth metals for complicated electronics – computers, phones, cruise missiles. They only stopped when it got cheaper to buy those same metals from China, who were getting them from Africa. But we kept consuming, and they kept digging, and now it’s too deep to fill back up.”
The other man looked naggingly familiar. He leaned forward in his wheelchair. “One time, when we were kids, we threw in a washing machine. And God as my witness, we never heard it land.”
“That hole is as deep as is our ability to consume. But Steven, Steven, Steven – there is a bottom! It’s just not apparent to you.” The first man moved his white knight. “Just because you didn’t hear it doesn’t mean that washing machine didn’t explode into bits somewhere.”
“There is an old Maytag.” The familiar man glanced at Brad and leaned back in his wheelchair, smiling. “And right now, as we speak, it’s still falling... and falling… and falling…”
Black pawn took white knight.
White queen slid three squares.
Check.
Brad got weird-silent as a sense of reverence reserved for talking with God befell him. And before the familiar-looking man could pull his black king out of check, Brad stood, nodded to the both of them, and left to get his coat.
He knew what he had to do. Monica had been ahead of her time. He ditched his pills, stole an orderly’s keys, and took her car. Nobody stopped him. He wondered if this was because they, too, agreed he should do an end zone run off the southern lip and spike his wretched body off this plane of never-ending decay; to fall forever into a timeless night. Like that washing machine. Not alive. Not dead. Just falling forever.
He pulled the stolen Ford Focus past the gutted frames of abandoned houses and rotting dump sites that used to be neighbourhoods. Its high beams didn’t behave like the headlights from his memories, which invariably disappeared into the darkness beyond that last harrowing lip of old Gland Canyon. Instead, they bobbed up and down across wavy grey corrugated metal sheeting, topped with skin-flaying concertina wire. He drove further. It was the same.
They had built a wall.
He laughed, then rested his forehead on the Ford’s steering wheel and cried. A suicide barrier.
Like a moth bumbling up a greasy lampshade, he attempted to shimmy up a fence post through a gap in the wire. But his ex-quarterback’s arms and legs couldn’t support the weight he’d accumulated in his old age and he collapsed at the base, where he sobbed until the sun came up.
He watched the sun’s glow crest the horizon and swell into dirty yellow – bright enough to core out his dimming eyes and bore into his brain, inside which he was always falling,
and falling,
and falling.
H. A. Eugene is an O. Henry-nominated writer of strange stories about food, work, and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Radon Journal, HAD, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social and Instagram @h_a_eugene.