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The Yearning of the All-Devouring Earth

by Marianne Kirby

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It’s always when we find a moment of peace that the universe remembers we exist—or maybe it’s less that the universe remembers, and more that it feels bored in our general vicinity and has to do something about that.

The local middle school flooded over the summer. The afternoon rain we expected regular as clockwork arrived and didn’t stop for what must have been two or two and a half weeks before the clouds disappeared completely. Then, on the first day back to school, a sinkhole opened up in the parking lot. It looked like someone had come along with a giant ice cream scoop and dipped out a portion of the asphalt and the dirt underneath it and the limestone underneath that, leaving the edges clean and sharp.

Everyone in town went to look at the sinkhole, to peer into the deep pit. I gazed down into the shadowy basin and I heard that man whispering to me, warning me.

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In the spring of 1987, I lived in Atlanta, Georgia and worked as a travel agent. People needed travel agents then to book their airplane tickets and hotels, especially if they traveled internationally. I felt so fancy, like I’d really come up in the world, every time I printed an itinerary on the dot matrix printer and separated out the triplicate pages into their little envelopes. At night I went out to nightclubs, danced in high narrow heels until I couldn’t feel the pain in my feet anymore. The cocaine we did in the bathroom helped with that, too.

The drugs are probably why I can remember the rustle of the fucking printer paper, the way the thin sheets felt between my fingers, but I can’t remember the name of the old white man who liked to corner women at my favorite club. The first time he tried it on me, I thought he was making a pass, that he meant to reach out and touch my tits or my ass or shove me against the wall and rub up against me. Instead, he leaned in and smelled my hair, right where it fell in permed curls by my ear.

“Don’t go underground,” he whispered to me, barely loud enough to be heard over the music. He leaned back and blinked at me then, his face as confused as I felt about the situation. The crowd separated us, the current of moving bodies pulling me deeper into the dance floor and him toward the safe shore of the bar area.

My friends closed around me, a circle of protection. We looked out for each other, as much as we could, though every single one of us was genuinely shitty at taking care of ourselves. They didn’t ask what the man said to me. We always hoped for the best and expected the worst in those days. I closed my eyes and moved my body, full of the light and the music and the smoke and the energy of everyone around me. I danced and felt profane and sacred both, a priestess dedicated to some unnamed pleasure god whose face turned to all of us in the night.

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The man’s words came back to me at odd times: when I got fucked in the club bathroom by a stranger and he finished early enough to be embarrassed about it and wiped his come-slick dick on my thigh before rushing out of the stall, when I drove to work in rush-hour traffic like one tiny fish in a whole big school, when I woke up to pee in the dead middle of night and fumbled in the dark to find the commode from my granny’s old trailer because that’s what my half-sleeping brain expected even though I lived in a garden apartment in a city in a different state. I thought maybe he meant I shouldn’t go to that shopping development they were putting into the old Underground Atlanta. I tried to write it off as drunk nonsense.

The man seemed to find me almost every time we went out. He never said another thing, just smelled my hair like he savored the maximum hold hairspray and sweat and cigarette smoke trapped in it and then wandered away. I laughed it off every time, almost grateful he didn’t touch me or otherwise try to force anything on me.

I actually started to miss him a little bit when a night went by without the ritual of his approach. My friends all figured I’d be relieved but instead I felt consumed by a vague worry, a conviction that he’d done what he told me not to do. He’d gone underground, whatever the hell that even meant, and I sought out the bartender when he ducked out for a smoke break an hour before last call.

“You didn’t hear?” The bartender flicked his lighter three times unsuccessfully, groaned and leaned against the wall of the alley out in back of the club. “No one knows what happened but his body turned up in the shark tank at Limelight earlier today. Naked as the day he was born and missing some parts—guess they didn’t need to feed the sharks tonight.”

He reached down behind the trashcans and came back up with another lighter like it was a magic trick. The flame cast the lines of his face in harsh shadow, made him look old until the cherry on his cigarette flared and he closed his eyes, took a greedy drag. He read my silence for an invitation, reached to touch my breast. My whole body went rigid at his news, and I had to shake off the picture in my head of the glass dance floor, the sharks circling underneath while crowds of people partied above before I could shake his hand off. I left my friends at the club and got out of there.

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I got to Limelight and where there’d usually be a line, I found only the doorman, leaning against the doorframe. I waited for him to run his disapproving eyes over my body, the price of entrance. And then I told him the bartender sent me over.

“Oh, you’re in luck. The cops haven’t shown back up yet.” He laughed, mean around the edges, and opened the door for me, jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the empty dance floor. “Yeah, go on and take a look.”

The lights over the dance floor still flashed but the club stood empty, almost surreal to me. I hated turning my back on the doorman, felt the skin crawl between my shoulder blades. When I looked back, he winked at me.

My heels sounded loud without any music to cover them. I glanced down, spotted a shark, and then looked around for the other one.

Instead, I saw a hand, fingers curled in a delicate gesture, almost a greeting, and my breath came faster as my eyes focused and my heart thudded hard in my chest and my ears.

The old white man from the club floated in the shark tank beneath Limelight’s famous glass dance floor, beneath my feet. A long trail of red bled out from a hollow in his side where something—one of the sharks or maybe both of them—had taken a generous bite. He was naked, hairy all over and pale, his dick flaccid and swaying with whatever current kept the oxygen moving.

His eyes opened and he blinked at me, like he recognized me, appreciated my visit. He seemed on the verge of speaking when a hand came down on my shoulder. I shrieked as I whirled around to face the doorman, still smirking with cruel amusement.

“Cops are finally on their way. You get on out of here.” He didn’t offer a hand to steady me, just backed off and waited for me to move.

I took one last look on my way out. The old white man’s eyes were closed.

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We always keep where we’re from inside us, right underneath our skin no matter how much we clean up and practice losing our accents and learn to like cultured things, like going to see stage plays and eating sushi.

There were no sushi restaurants when I finally gave up at the end of that terrible year, gave in, and headed back home after granny died: to the actual home of my blood and my bones in this small North Florida town. I used the key I’d never taken off my key ring to go inside her old trailer, crawled into her bed where the sheets still smelled of the baby powder she used to prevent heat rash in all her tender places.

Of course I cried. The grief wanted to swallow me up like a whale and carry me to the bottom of the ocean where I’d get crushed in the dark. But grief doesn’t pay the bills; I got a job working dispatch at the bus depot and settled into the same old small town rhythms I’d been so eager to escape; I felt grateful for the comfort of a shitty job and low expectations.

I went to the local high school football games on Friday nights and shopped at the local produce stand on Saturday mornings same as everybody else. I ate my way through the deer meat in my granny’s chest freezer in the utility shed. I planted a small garden. It was some version of safety, at least.

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Sinkholes don’t respect human concerns, don’t stop and think about how there’s a road or a school or an entire house sitting on the land above them. Sinkholes just swallow it all up in to the earth and never return anything that’s lost.

I thought about the sinkhole in the middle school parking lot constantly, the man’s voice in my ear like he was leaning into to smell my hair there in the middle of the feminine hygiene aisle of the drugstore or the dairy aisle of the grocery store. There isn’t much real underground in Florida, I tried to reason with his ghost, what with the whole state mostly being at sea level. I could go outside and dig a hole—the water would find it, would rise to fill it no matter how shallow. Eventually almost every sinkhole becomes just another lake, complete with alligators and mosquitoes.

Then another sinkhole opened up: bigger and deeper, which set back all my practice ignoring my memories. The back corner of the JC Penny, where the shoe department sat, disappeared down into the earth while I shopped for some sensible new bras. The sound registered first, like a muffled explosion barely audible over the music playing on the tinny store speakers. The lights flickered off and back on and then off for good, leaving everyone in the dark for what felt like too-long heartbeats before the emergency lights switched on with a red glow. People made a break for the mall entrance, scrambling for safety. The floor rumbled and the world itself shook.

I moved with the press of bodies, caught in the exit flow. We gasped as one and it reminded me of dance floors, all of us led by a heartbeat that came from somewhere else, all of us caught unawares in a rite of worship. People yelled and cried out; my ears rang with the absence of the sinkhole’s sound when it faded away. A woman clutched at her children and sobbed, terror and relief and other unknowable emotions all bursting forth in the moment.

My hands were shaking.

Some of the men, with more curiosity than sense, shouted about helping anyone left behind and pushed their way back into the store. I followed in a daze and no one tried to stop me. All the clothing racks were in disarray and one of the glass fronts on the jewelry display counter was smashed. Some quick thinker had taken advantage of the situation.

I passed a man carrying a child who’d gotten left behind; the child stared out blankly, face like a stone. The others gathered at the edge of the sinkhole, voices gone quiet in shock as they took in the devastation: live wires, crumbling masonry, and hanging light fixtures. Daylight filtered in from the collapsed walls, sneaking in through the wreckage of the roof. We all looked down into the hole and the men pointed at little bits of merchandise and mannequins they could still glimpse.

The torso of one mannequin, wearing a hot pink high-necked blouse with a bow in front, had been caught on a little outcropping part way down into the dark. Her head had fallen off at some point in the descent, but her arms reached up like she was begging all of us for help.

I wanted to reach out to her, wanted my arms to be long enough for my hand to hold hers and grasp it tight and pull what remained of her to safety, the same safety I had found. I could picture our fingers lacing together like it was really happening. I went to take a step closer and the man at my side jostled me for a better view of the chaos. I backed away and left the store with a Playtex bra still in my hands.

The store manager stood wailing outside. An ambulance pulled up, trailed by police cars with their lights flashing. I got in my car and drove home.

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I called in sick to work the next day, spent the morning staring at the old bottle of whiskey I’d found in the utility shed. Granny didn’t drink so I assumed it belonged to my grandfather. They divorced in the 1950s, and no one ever talked about the man. Now that I had run of the old trailer, I found hidden remembrances: the bottle of whiskey, a photo of their wedding day turned to face the wall in the back of the bedroom closet, a set of tools in a box monogrammed with his initials. His absence seemed louder in the silence of these buried mementos.

Don’t go underground, that man in the club told me—a simple enough instruction. But I started dreaming after that, every night about a cavern with blue-green water pooling and spilling into all the hidden places, the vast arching dome of its ceiling curving above my head. My own voice came back to me, answering questions in a language I didn’t know, couldn’t understand. Sharks circled in the water.

The sound of earth giving way lingered in my ears, still audible over the television and the radio and everything else I turned on trying to drown it out. I wanted to go down there. I wanted to climb down to that mannequin and ask her what she’d learned, spending the night surrounded by echoes of the past.

I might have headed to the mall then, but my stomach growled with the hunger of the body not ruled by the anxieties of the mind. That’s the beauty of being an animal—and we all are animals still when we aren’t paying attention—the body can know what it needs regardless of our fears and our desires.

That’s why I got up and cooked breakfast for myself, took my time about it so the grits would be creamy and smooth, glossy with butter. The edges of the egg browned crispy from frying in bacon fat and the yolk stayed runny. Don’t go underground, I told myself with every bite. The food sat heavy in my belly, fixed me to my seat.

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The problem with resolutions, especially those based on denial, is that I’ve never met one I couldn’t break. My determination to avoid the sinkholes only lasted long enough for a third one to appear.

It opened up right in the middle of town and carried a gas station down with it, complete with the attached garage full of cars and tires and tools. By the time the ground stabilized, the hole was almost 200 feet across and entirely as deep. Murky turquoise water glistened in the depths but the hole itself looked dry all the way down to the surface of the pool.

Geologists and other experts from the university over in Gainesville said the summer weather did it: The flooding eroded the limestone all underneath us and then the drought made the aquifer drop. The voids left behind collapsed under the weight of the things everyone chose to forget. The whole town was at risk.

The local paper published an editorial, written by some transplant to the area who was packing up and moving back north, getting out of Florida before the hole in the ozone layer got any bigger and the sea levels rose and drowned us in our sleep. That was all well and good for him—he hadn’t grown his roots into the grey Florida dirt, hadn’t learned to subsist on salt and sunshine alone through the hard times. The rest of us couldn’t leave, not for good and never for long. I tried, and I failed.

A bunch of scuba divers had already shown up looking to explore the network of caverns accessible via the sinkhole. I thought there surely had to be more pleasurable ways to die, but I still took note when the paper reported they’d somehow gotten clearance to build a long series of wooden stairs and a dive platform: 378 steps purpose-built to go underground.

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I worked a lot of days, but that Saturday I covered an evening shift for a friend who had a hot date, and I didn’t get out of work until 11pm. For all I’d used to start my evenings that late, I’d gotten used to being at home and comfortably in bed before ten, and I yawned all the way from the time clock to my car. I drove on auto-pilot then, trusted my hands and my car to lead me home.

Instead, I pulled into a parking spot down by the courthouse and blinked my eyes back into focus, a block from the sinkhole at close enough to midnight. I felt like I might already be dreaming in my bed, my mind wandering beyond the confines of my body. I’d done mushrooms with a girlfriend one night back in the city and then doubled up the next night with LSD and Ecstasy to celebrate my upcoming vacation. The resulting hallucinations followed me around for a week, little furry bundles of impossible creatures all eager for my attention if only I’d stop whatever I was doing to reach out for them, to focus on petting them. I’d felt distant in my own body then, controlled by some benign guiding hand. I felt the same as I tucked my purse all the way under the driver’s seat so I didn’t have to carry it with me and made sure my keys were firm in my jeans pocket.

Downtown closed up shop early; the sidewalks spread out entirely empty before me as I walked under the moonlight. The streetlights were out, power cut to the whole block, but I could see well enough to read the no trespassing signs as I passed them, ignored them.

The stairway access entrance had a yellow police ribbon stretched across it, black block letters telling me not to cross. I looked for any kind of security guard but no one called out to me to warn me off, so I ducked under the tape and started down.

If I’d been in control of myself enough to plan, I’d have taken a flashlight. The sinkhole absorbed the little bit of light shining in and hid it, saved it for later in some soft dark pocket. I gripped the steel pole they’d used as a railing with both hands and felt for each step with the toe of my boot before shifting my weight. I kept my eyes wide open, convinced they’d adjust if I only tried hard enough. I continued down.

After a little while, my eyes did seem to adapt; the outlines of shapes started to resolve, at first only darker shadows against the velvet of perfect night, but I kept climbing down—it felt like an endless descent—and the glow kept intensifying until I could see the water welcoming me with a soft phosphorescence. I’m not sure anything has ever been more beautiful to me than that cloudy blue glimmer growing brighter as I got closer.

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It’s a pretty story. And if that scrying pool at the bottom of a sinkhole remained the only thing I’d seen, I’d keep my secrets and close my eyes every night and think about the water, until I died with a smile on my face.

But something large occupied the platform at the bottom of the staircase, and I only saw it because a little bit of the glow from the water reflected off of its moist skin—I stopped, one foot extended to feel for the next step down, and even as I froze I knew that the creature below was turning its attention to me.

I could hear its movement when I held my breath, skin again skin in a regular familiar rhythm my body reacted to the same way it reacted to the tide of music, the push and pull of a dance floor’s volume. The thing at the bottom of the stairs rocked itself, touched itself and gleamed wetly all over. It was big, at least my size and I wasn’t small, especially since I’d stopped doing all the drugs.

At first I thought it must be a worm, some gigantic earthworm disturbed from the dirt of its home. I thought it must be a great worm, devouring all, come to claim some supernatural vengeance from my flesh, some price for my freedom from every temple I’d ever left behind.

But then I lost my balance and came down hard on the void between steps and as I grabbed at the railing even tighter, desperate to prevent my fall, I saw the thing’s face, its human face.

Its nearly human face. I could cop out here and tell you the creature was an indescribable horror, beyond the comprehension of mortal ken. And it is true the sight of it set my skin to crawling in my nice work clothes that stuck to my body with the humidity of the night-hot air in the sinkhole. It is true that my heart sped up and my blood felt like ice crawling through all of my veins when it turned its gaze to me, that uncanny creature with its open mouth, with its teeth chewing and chewing, devouring the thing it had caught, hunched next to a discarded wetsuit and some dive tanks.

I could do that but I won’t. The creature looked too broad and too flat; its arms were short and its face lacked a nose. I could see the outlines of its bones and organs through its translucent skin. It had a muscular tail, more like a water snake than a fish. Long hair hung down its back in something like a knotted braid.

It wasn’t the look of the thing that scared me; bodies are funny things, and the creature rocked side to side and lifted dripping meat that might have once been a scuba diver to its mouth with one hand and rubbed at its tail with the other. No, what finally spurred me to turn and climb the stairs, to get back up when I tripped and caught myself too clumsily, banged my face on a stair and tasted blood, was the hissing sound of pleasure it made when it caught my gaze, all intelligent, and it looked at me the way cruel men look at rare steaks and vulnerable women.

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Some people will tell you that true terror comes from space or another dimension, but I think those folks just mean people who don’t look like them. Maybe it would be easier to process if what I saw down there came from another plane of existence or if it didn’t belong to the earth more thoroughly than humans ever could. Maybe it would be easier if I could believe it was unnatural.

But people are wrong about the most frightening things. And I can still hear that creature, crawling around down there, managing its hunger in hidden tunnels and caverns, ignored by us, waiting until the earth collapses and delivers us up to the pleasure of the unknown and unknowable there in the depths. The sound is so loud, and I know that one alone could never survive. When I close my eyes at night now, it isn’t the pool I see. It’s teeth, purposeful teeth gnashing in the dark, not there to absolve me from my guilt or extract payment for my sins but simply consuming. We have built on hollow earth, on an illusion of safety that leads to suffocation, and the earth below us doesn’t care what we’ve done or what we might yet do. There’s no divine balance reaching out to touch us.

It’s just that I’ve been listening, waiting for the world to open up again and drag me down, as dedicated as any priestess waiting for my god to return, waiting for the universe to pay attention. We know hunger and cruelty in this world; I expect it. But I felt the ground tremble this morning, heard the grind and squeal of rock about to give way, and thought of mysterious pleasure.

That man once warned me not to go underground. I didn’t heed his advice, and it doesn’t matter anymore. The underground is coming to us.