Inescapable

The sound of a shovel plunging into the earth is jarring; each cacophonous impact sets a chill to climbing up me, vertebrae by vertebrae. I shrug the tingles away, strengthened by an encompassing focus on my dig, while time slips by seemingly unnoticed. If I pause, though, I feel as if I've been at this my whole life; blisters have callused, shoulders have grown taught with muscle, and my back has rounded with the repeated weight of the cumbersome process. Metronomically, I toil with a predictable rhythm, one tick accompanies a stab of the soil, one tock carries a load of dirt flung high over my shoulder.

Is this getting harder to do? I can't tell, I've no time to stop and consider. The shovel is impatient, after all.

With my head down and bent to my work, I think about how it must be light soon. The sun should be breaching the sky just over my left shoulder any minute now, and I anticipate an illumination on the horizon. Contrarily, no births of light pique my notice, possibly a trick of time while I am so ensconced with my task: I must have worked right through the new dawn, the dusk that followed, and now find myself so obviously in the midst of the succeeding night.

Why do my ponderings of the hour only percolate, through the haze of my focus, in the dark of nights? I seem to excel at pursuing my labor, despite and without noticing, the warmth or the brilliance of each day. But, I've no recollection that it was always just so. And so day after day, or night after night, as it were, my exertion continues.


Stab, lift, throw.

Thrust, hoist, heave.


In the dark of dark, one such launching leaves a feeling of something different under my shirt, through my spine: a cascading descent, very different and more tangible than the usual, familiar crawling ascent. With an annoyed shake of my head, I fling away the particles of soil that clung to my scalp during their free fall. The metronome cannot be disobeyed, so I brush aside my agitation, like so much loam, and skip not one beat.

Again and again, now, my tosses are missing their mark and I am repeatedly showered in the flesh of the earth. But so ingrained is the omnipresent tick ... tock, it is an irresistible drive forward, and I double down on my struggles. Although, a feeling begins to creep in, gently pushing against the curtain that protects my fixation on my excavation.

That feeling seems to be bordering on numb... Physically numb.

My feet are covered in dirt, rising almost to meet my knees. Clearly, I've not progressed my task for quite some time, and whats more, my chilled-through extremities are shaking in a most unreasonable manner. I am being engulfed. By my own hands. And devotion to my drudgery. Even the familiar sound of the chronometer is muffled under the weight of the filth, temporarily allaying its lethal grip on me.

My searching hands disclose no secrets but cold, loose-fill walls.
My pricked ears gather nothing but silence.
My observational nose samples only the obvious: olfactory earthiness.
My Scouring eyes tell no story but darkness.

Almost total darkness. All dark but a subtle, effusive gleam from directly above.

A revelation is coagulating within my psyche: My jaded mind saw only a prevalence of night while I worked at my compulsive task. But the truth is more abstract than that; less black and white, and more gray.

The truth is... when you've dug this deep,
it's always night down here.

My job had begun on the surface, with never a thought to any possible necessity for tools of egress; the project was never meant to be a hole, never intended to continue so long and gradually, never aimed to burrow so deep.

Buried under the living and amongst the dead,
the assimilation into this new community of inert peers
is inescapable.