Hole by Chris Turner-Neal

​

    You’d think growing up near a bottomless pit would have been exciting, but even the weirdest absence is just that—not there. The opening was only about as big as a softball. Every few years someone would come out from the university and measure again: no apparent bottom, no increase in temperature as the instruments descended to the ends of the cables. When I was in middle school, someone designed a probe, like you’d send to space. It kept falling until it passed out of transmission range. That shouldn’t have been possible, but it happened anyway.
    It’s scary for kids. You lie awake at night and you know you’re too big to fall in, nothing bigger than a prairie dog could get through the opening, but what if? Die of thirst, old age, hitting an unimaginably distant bottom—or does something lurk there in the unmeasurable dark? And then you get a little older, into the moody years, and you wish you could fit. Slip past the rim and let the dark swallow you and fall farther and farther away. And then by the time you’re in high school it’s as boring as everything but boys and beer, but you get a job at the tourist trap around the hole anyway because it’s that or Wal-Mart, and you’d rather see people driving from Marfa to Roswell on their “Weird Southwest” pilgrimages than the same faces you’ve seen every day since you were born, and that if you don’t get out, you’ll see every day till you die. So picking up hours at Pete’s Pit and Pizza it was, running a snack bar by a hole in the world.
    We got close, working at the abyss. People came and left—you know how kids are—but there were about five of us that all worked there together through most of high school. We’d even go up there with beers and drink when it was closed (easy to get rid of the empties). That tells you we were a tight little clique, but it also tells you the kind of town we grew up in.
Nothing else to do. New hires, first time drinking after hours, had to lie flat with their faces up against the opening for a count of five-Mississippi. Eyes open or closed, yell into the echoless nothing or just breathe—you had to face it, close enough to kiss. Then you were in.
    People weren’t supposed to throw things into the pit—littering, even if it falls out in China or Hell or the seventeenth dimension. But usually we’d let people throw stuff in if it wasn’t trash. Lucky pennies (explain how that’s lucky). Holy water from Jerusalem to bless
whatever’s down there. A lot of ashes—mostly people sending Mom on a last adventure, but one lady dumped her father down, threw the urn in after him, and then put her mouth right to the hole and screamed. No words. Just rage. We gave her a free soda, not because she needed the soda but because she needed someone to be sweet to her.
    And we did it too. Started as a joke, of course, and all those empty beers. Tomas threw in a shitty report card or something. We all pissed down it at one point or another. You know how it is. Piss on what you don’t understand. But one night we were up there boozing—Marcus had gotten a bottle of vodka from his dad’s cabinet, and we were passing it around taking sips. Jenna had put some Jolly Ranchers in “to make it taste good.” Lucy was laid out on the ground with her cigarette hand over the hole, ashing into it. We were all bitching about whatever kids bitch about—and Jenna said, “You know, fuck it. It’s going in the hole.” And she took out this note
some boy had written her and wadded it up and free-threw it right in. Marcus pulled out a traffic ticket or something, took a step back to show off, and threw it at the hole. Bounced off the rim, and Lucy had to tap it in. Tomas, an extra couple of beers in, crawled the few feet to the mouth of the hole and yelled, “Come get my drunk-ass dad!” Changed the energy, but we were ready.
We all had a lot built up to throw in, if we could. We wound up sitting in a circle, going around like Truth or Dare, sending our problems into the hole. No money, broken car, shitty parents, shitty town. The first time I ever said out loud that I was gay was that night, trying to get rid of by screaming it into the nothing under the world. (Didn’t take.)
    And nothing we screamed into the hole went away. It didn’t fix Lucy’s fuel pump or sober up Tomas’s dad or make me like girls or make Jenna not like me. It wasn’t magic, and it didn’t mean anything. But it gave us somewhere to scream. Years later, I asked Lucy if she ever wished she still had it to scream into. She said every Goddamn day.
    And after a while it was over. The owner of the tourist trap sold the land to the university, and we closed it down. On the last day, Lucy got all our name tags and pinned them together in a bunch; she kissed it and sent it down the pit. “To remember.” And we scattered—college, cities, marriages, jobs in the oil patch. Marcus died. I haven’t been back to Texas, much less the old town, in years, but that handful of plastic keeps our names tied to each other as it falls on and on and on, chasing everything we tried to throw away forever.