Dirt World

The morning sunlight stings Hazel’s eyes as she looks out of the living room window. It’s one of those golden mornings that drape the clouds in orange and pink, yet all she can think about is her dad’s impending rant about the moles. She breathes a sigh into her coffee’s steam, sending it spiralling. Outside on the lawn are three mounds of dark soil that hadn’t been there yesterday. After the amount of effort that went into setting those newest traps, his fury will be terrible. 

They’re turning my yard into Swiss cheese!  
It looks like torn up garbage!  
I’m going to dig them out of the ground and wring their necks!  

Hazel’s mom was the only one who could ever contain the mole rage. She used a carefully balanced combination of scolding and soothing that Hazel had never learned to master. She always ended up getting it backwards and disaster always resulted. Since her mother died the mole episodes have gotten worse, dragging on for weeks at a time. He’s developed a strange squint when he’s in the depths of one. It has become more pronounced lately. He’s been baring his teeth at Hazel in an unsettling way when he rants as well.  

The great War of the Lawn had been going on since before Hazel was born. They’d come and go, those blind, rodent warriors, flaring up in one summer or another, only to disappear for a year, maybe two. Just long enough for Dad to let his guard down. He caught one, once, when Hazel was a kid and thought she’d want to see it. She did not.  

Instead of a nose, it had something like the palm of a hand, the skin pink like a baby’s. It’s flippers made it look like some grotesque alien, like a creature of both land and sea. Two worlds in one disgusting little creature. It squirmed in the trap, and Hazel had squealed. That rodent haunted her nightmares for years afterwards and they’ve sickened her ever since.  

From down the hall comes the choke and hiss of the shower starting up. Hazel might be able to get him in a good mood with some banter before he sees the lawn. Once he notices he’ll be like a boulder rolling downhill.  

She fetches the waffle maker she got him for his seventieth birthday. He used to love Mom’s waffles and was so deliberate about pouring precise amounts of syrup into each square segment. A “flavour grid” he called it. Waffles might help. Hazel opens it to find a thick layer of old, flaking batter burnt onto the iron. It resists Hazel’s furious scrubbing admirably. The thing’s barely passable by the time she hears the shower go silent. She pours his coffee, adds a swirl of cream, a scoop of sugar, and hopes for the best. 

His booming baritone announces his emergence from the bathroom. It’s some half-forgotten hippie anthem – an old favorite of Mom’s. His grey-on-grey jogging pants and sweater don’t quite meet at the peak of his belly, exposing a rosy strip of hairy skin. There’s more hair on his belly than she remembers. He’s damp, and the grey cotton darkens three or four shades around his chest, armpits, and crotch. 

“Morning, feel like waffles?” Hazel says, careful not to heap on too much cheer. 

“I don’t feel like waffles, I feel like an old man who slept like crap,” he says, punctuating his words with snorts and throaty chortles. “Pancakes are better.” 

It’s his surly old man schtick, he’s been putting it on since before he actually became one. The crinkles around his eyes give away his playfulness. 

“Yeah, I’ll make you pancakes if you want.”  

Same batter, different process, no problem. 

“Pick one or the other, quit waffling.”  

Hazel turns away and the smile drops. She gathers the ingredients for pancake batter and begins swatting the mixture smooth. Dad makes his way into the living room. Hazel can’t think of anything to stop him physically grabbing him. That wouldn’t go well. The waffle iron hisses as it heats up, and she just stands there and stirs. 

“Damnit, three new ones!” 

Hazel usually savours the sound of the batter sizzling onto the iron but it’s drowned out by her father’s tirade. He’s still going strong when the waffles are served. His vitriol dominates breakfast and Hazel is forced to nod along with every frothing ounce of it. That anger has the potential to turn towards her, she knows. Despite her best efforts, he notices her strained expressions and gives her a glare. 

“I suppose I’m boring you,” he says, on the brink of shouting. “Nothing worth listening to?”  

There’s a terrible clatter when he swats his plate from the table and the waffles land syrupy side down. Hazel’s fingers come away sticky after she cleans the mess.  

Once upon a time they’d binge-watched shows together, shout at sports, or play cards. Now Hazel’s weekend visits are spent taking care of essentials; groceries, laundry, taking out the garbage. Listening to mole rants. The only thing he ever asks for help with is the moles. As a result, Hazel’s become a reluctant expert in ineffective mole extermination. Her stomach turns at the thought of digging up a trap that has one pinched between its steel fingers. Yet she shows up, week after week, to help set up medieval looking devices, bury poisonous smoke bombs, and flood holes with the garden hoses. When her father began talking about pouring gasoline into his yard, Hazel was forced to draw a line. Things have been frosty between them ever since.  

His nails have grown long. 

“I’ll squish their little rodent heads between my fingers,” he says on his way to the bathroom. He stoops more than he used to. Stoops and squints. 

To him, each mound of churned mole dirt is a personal attack, an affront to his honour. To the moles, however, Hazel imagines her father is the Devil. A mythical Mole Devil who brims with unfathomable malice and is hard to enjoy waffles with. She makes up an excuse to leave while fishing her car keys out of her pocket.  

He’s sloppier when he eats. He’ll pick up the partially chewed food that falls from his lips and nibble it off his fingertips. Hazel loathes the nibbling. 

“I’ll skin one and shove it’s bleeding pelt back into the hole as a warning to the rest.” 

“I’m going to do a shop.” 

Lately, he’s hardly been noticing when she makes her weak excuses to leave. She stays out longer than she means to, haunts grocery stores and coffee shops until guilt brings her back. When she returns, her father is on all fours on the front lawn with his face inches from a dismantled mole hill. 

“It’s been twitching,” he says. 

“I know, Dad.” 

“I’m going to get them.” 

“I know.” 

His voice growls and squeaks. 

“I’m going to make BLTs for lunch,” Hazel says. He remains on his knees, staring into the dirt, pawing at the ground. “I don’t think they’re coming back right now, Dad.” 

When the weekend is over and they say goodbye, he’s looking over Hazel’s shoulder, flicking his eyes from mound to mound.  

“. . . six, seven, eight . . .” she hears him say under his breath. There’s only six. 

At the next visit Hazel has to let herself in after knocking for nearly ten minutes. It takes a while to find the spare key on Hazel’s overcrowded keychain. 

“Dad?” she calls when she gets inside. 

There’s no response. Muddy footprints step all over each other throughout the house. There’s been a home invasion, she’s certain of it. Dad’s dead or hogtied somewhere suffocating into his own sock. Adrenaline pickles her as she fumbles from room to room, past her mom’s porcelain angels, her decorative plates, the box of yarn and her knitting needles. At last Hazel finds him in the basement next to the growling furnace. He’s hunched forward on a rocking chair that squeaks and crunches against the hard packed dirt floor. On his lap is a shoebox.  

He coos to something inside. His eyes, looking small and dark, widen briefly at Hazel’s appearance. Gone is the emerald glint in his eye that he passed on to her. 

“Dad? Didn’t you hear me calling?” 

“Oh hey . . .” he spends a moment mumbling before giving up the search for Hazel’s name. “Take a looksee.”  

He nods to the box. 

Hazel peers inside to find a cowering mole pressed into a corner. After an involuntary pair of steps backward, she takes a breath and leans in for another look. It’s a soft, grey dot against the white cardboard. The thing looks frozen in terror. 

“How?” 

“I saw one of the mounds moving and I grabbed it,” he says, staring at the captive creature. Dad wiggles his nose. “I didn’t expect to actually get anything. I never get anything. This one’s just a baby.”  

With the pad of his pinky he gently strokes its fur. A trio of red marks and a new scab indicate he’s been bitten. Hazel and her father go outside to release the creature. It swims into the earth effortlessly, disappearing in an instant. He reaches into the hole after it, forcing his hand in to the wrist. Dirt falls from him in clumps when he pulls it out. As he sees Hazel to her car, she can hear him counting the mole hills. The anger’s out of his whispers, though. 

Work calls Hazel away for a month. It can’t be avoided. She thinks about her dad often while she’s rattling around the grey hotel conference rooms wearing lanyards with her name on them. It’s worse on the weekends when she should be there with him. Their phone calls are lopsided. Each of his responses become harder to hear, yet he seems happy enough. 

“Weather’s beautiful, I’ve been getting outside more,” he says. 

“You’re okay?”  

She can hear the concern in her own voice. If Hazel can hear it, her father can. She winces for a snap that never comes. 

“I’m fine,” he says. 

When she returns, her dad is sitting in a hole in his back yard. It’s deep, over his head. At the bottom he has formed a dirt-replica of the recliner in his living room. 

“It’s comfy down here, nice and cool,” he insists. 

The earth around him muffles his voice. 

The sight of her father down there sends a wash of adrenaline through Hazel. His appearance is disgusting. Soil coats him, he’s shirtless and now has patches of thick, gray fuzz covering his chest, shoulders, and back. It’s not the wiry silver hairs that used to poke through his sweaters. This fuzz is velvety. It covers the backs of his hands and his cheeks, too. His fur seems to repel the dirt that smears all over the rest of him. His jogging pants are soiled nearly black. Hazel’s mind races to grasp what could possibly have caused such a change. It’s happened so quickly. He squints hard up at her when she kneels to help him out of the hole.  

He reaches for her splayed fingers and Hazel finds she doesn’t want him to touch her. Her own father. Long, pale fingernails hook from each of his thickened fingers. His arms have shortened and grown wider. His face is more pointed and pinched. She shoves the revulsion away and grabs for his hand. He dodges and spreads a layer of dirt up her forearm. He seems rather pleased with himself at that. The dirt does sort of feel nice. It has a whiff of nostalgia, of childhood play, bugs, stones, and hidden treasures. 

There’s a shiver of revulsion as well and she pulls her hand away. Dad seems content to lay in his hole so Hazel heads to the kitchen to make him some noodle soup. And to think about what she’s going to do about her father. She needs help but if she takes him to a doctor he’ll be scrutinized to death. They’ll gather from around the world to drain his blood for analysis, subject him to a litany of questions, monitor him day and night until he ceases to be a person. No, she can’t have that.  

She hopes the soup she makes has cooled enough for him. A little bit spills as she lowers it. Dad doesn’t eat any, though he plucks a worm from the dirt and plops it into his mouth right in front of her. Hazel takes pride in the fact she held down the gag when nausea begins writhing in her belly. She needs to occupy her mind. With Dad occupying his hole, there isn’t much for Hazel to do around the place. Aside from the ones he’s wearing, his clothes are clean, the fridge is stocked, his car hasn’t moved in months. 

“Will you come inside?” she asks when the sun dips low and the sky turns orange. 

He looks around his hole contentedly, and shrugs.  

“For me?” Hazel says.  

He climbs out slowly, hesitantly, like he’s stepping through a mirror. He glares at the dusk’s light. There might be some fear on his face as well but it’s tough to tell with all the changes. Her dad settles once he’s inside. He collapses onto the couch like he’s deflating. She runs a comb over him to get the dirt and pebbles out of his fur. She gets him into the bathtub and begins rinsing, coaxing the dirt from beneath his thick fingernails. He likes the warm water. His lively nose makes Hazel smile and he smiles back. 

“What are we going to do?” she asks him.  

His smile fades when he spots a tear spill from her eye. Hazel swallows hard to keep the rest back. They hug and his velvety fuzz feels nice. Dad doesn’t speak for the rest of the visit. 

Next weekend he’s gone. The holes in his yard have been filled, patted firm, and reseeded. She calls for him and has the strangest certainty that making loud noises will drive him further away. Hazel’s search takes her into the basement where she catches the mold and clay scent of soil. Drywall and framing have been pulled apart and the concrete foundation has been torn into chunks, exposing the dirt beyond.  

What incredible effort it must have taken to break his way through, into that world of darkness. Before she starts fussing over the dirt and debris everywhere, Hazel spends a long while thinking about her father blindly tunnelling, navigating the depths of his yard. She hopes he can find his way around.  

All sorts of subterranean dwellers are getting into the house through the hole. Grubs, worms, ants, all make themselves at home as ambassadors from her father’s dirt world. Hazel makes him a Caesar salad with chicken breast sliced onto it. She leaves it next to the hole. He won’t eat it, she knows, but he might be tempted by the maggots once they show up.