A Soul Unearthed
Gregory Marlow (He/Him) is an associate professor, animator, and writer living in East Tennessee with his wife, Amanda, and dog, Sadie. He has animated on over a dozen video game titles, and his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, PodCastle, Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. You can find him online at gregmarlow.com. This is Greg’s second story for Asimov’s and combines his childhood obsessions with heavy construction equipment, giant robots, and digging in the backyard with a spoon (he didn’t have cable TV). It explores the things we unearth if we are brave enough to keep digging.
[Content Warning: Miscarriage]
The first time Cedric saw the little girl, she was staring at him from a raised pile of limestone in the middle of the dig site, her yellow sundress waving in the hot July breeze.
He immediately let off the stick and stepped off the pedals, bringing the excavator to a halt mid-scoop.
This wasn’t a bring-your-daughter-to-work-day kind of job site. He went through four levels of armed security to get to the dig at the top of the mountain every morning. How the hell had the little girl got there in the first place?
He was looking around the site for the closest foreman when he realized that the other two excavators were still running, still scooping debris from the piles that had been loosened from blasting.
Why weren’t they stopping? Surely they saw that splash of yellow dress and tangle of dark hair flipping in the wind, the only contrast in a world of gray stone and dirt. Kurt was a little further down the hill, but Nash was just a couple dozen yards away, continuing to move scoops of rock.
Cedric’s breath caught in his throat. The little girl was directly in the path of Nash’s bucket.
Cedric reached for his console radio, fumbling with the buttons as the arm spun toward the little girl. She was still staring at Cedric, her dark eyes lined with thick eyelashes, her skin the same color of silty soil as Cedric’s own.
He finally pressed the button and shouted into the radio, “Nash, stop!” knowing he was too late.
He cringed, pushing back in his seat, but he didn’t look away. Why didn’t he look away? Because her eyes were locked on his? Because he didn’t want to break the only human connection she had in the last moments of her life?
Gail’s momma had said at the funeral five years ago, “Everyone dies alone.” He had hated her even more for that comment.
But the little girl didn’t die alone. She didn’t die at all.
The bucket and rock, big enough to be called a boulder, passed through where the little girl had been standing with enough speed and force to destroy a truck.
Nash, whose reaction time was always slow, brought the arm to a stop about five feet too late. A few seconds later, his marble-mouthed drawl came through the radio. “What the hell, Ced?”
Cedric didn’t answer for several seconds. He just stared at the empty pile of rocks where the little girl had been a few minutes before.
Cedric brought the radio to his mouth. “Sorry, Nash. My bad, man. Thought you were going to hit that pile of rocks.”
“Get some damn glasses, man.”
“Yeah. My bad,” he repeated. “I think I’m going to take a five-minute break. Heat’s getting to me.”
When Cedric was eight years old, he accidentally cut a worm in half while digging in the backyard. Digging random holes was his hobby. He’d use old hand spades or discarded kitchen spoons to unearth rocks, strange-shaped pieces of metal and plastic, and all the other secrets held by the dirt. It also left little divots in the ground that would piss off his stepdad when he’d hit them with the riding lawn mower. Cedric’s stepdad loved to mow almost as much as he loved pointing out the things that made Cedric a “sissy.”
One day, Cedric pulled up a scoop of rich, black Georgian soil to see a worm sticking out of the dirt and wiggling wildly. At the bottom of the hole was a smaller segment of the worm, flopping around in no particular direction.
Cedric’s cousin had told him that if you cut a worm in half, it would make two worms. As he stared at the two flopping segments, he thought, “What happens to its soul?”
The questions added up from there. Do worms even have souls? If worms don’t have souls, did that mean his dog, Uber, didn’t have a soul? If Uber didn’t have a soul, then Uber wouldn’t go to heaven with Cedric. But it would also mean that Uber wouldn’t go to hell for killing that rabbit last week. Maybe souls depended on the size of the animal or the size of its brain.
If the worm had a soul before Cedric cut it in half, were both worms going to share a soul now? Did they each get the same amount of the soul, or was it portioned out based on the worm’s length?
Maybe the new worm got a new soul. Had Cedric created a soul by cutting this worm in half? Which worm got to keep the old soul, and which one got the new one?
If he cut the worm into tiny pieces, would each piece get its own new soul? The allure of power momentarily filled him. It was scary, and he pushed it away by slowly lowering the rusty spade of dirt back into the hole and covering the two wiggling worm halves.
Everyone from the dig site rode the bus from the foot of the mountain back to the Lazy Daze Motel, where Nash and Cedric shared a room. The dig paid the bill, but there weren’t enough rooms for everyone to have a single. Everyone from the dig, including the armed guards, was shoehorned into the motel on the outskirts of Bryson City. Cedric got the impression that the cost was not even a drop in the bucket for the company that had hired him.
He had gotten the referral from Harlon Koburn, a contractor he had worked with a few months before on a subdivision. He said that some guys had shown up in suits looking for referrals for a government-funded project out in North Carolina. Good pay, double for overtime, expenses covered, and they provide the equipment.
Cedric had been planning to take a couple of weeks off during the heat. He had put back a little money, and it wasn’t like he had many expenses other than rent. But the gig sounded intriguing. A mystery gig. And if he was being completely honest with himself, that’s why he went to work every day: to see what was buried in the dirt. To dig. To search. He never really knew what he was searching for, what he needed to uncover for himself, so he just dug where other people told him to.
Cedric went straight up to the room and laid claim to the shower first. He stood under the hot water, letting it run down his face and wash away the memory of the little girl standing on the rocks. It had just been the heat.
He toweled off and stood in front of the mirror for a few minutes, enjoying the silence before putting on his basketball shorts and exiting out into the shared motel room.
Nash was lying on his bed, still wearing his nasty work clothes, and talking in a low, soft voice to his girlfriend, Sabrina, on a pay-as-you-go cell phone.
The NDA they signed on the first day had forbidden them from using outside communication devices. They had to check their phones in with an officer on the ground floor of the motel, who kept them in a storage locker until their contract was finished. Even the motel room phones had been altered to only call the front desk.
Nash had secretly bought what he referred to as his “burner phone” at a Dollar General a few days earlier when the bus had stopped to let them buy snacks and personal items.
Cedric lay on his own bed and turned on the TV with the volume low. He found a baseball game. The Braves. He wasn’t sure if it was live or a rerun, and he didn’t care. He needed something to stare at so Nash wouldn’t try to talk to him. Baseball was a safe enough program for two men to watch quietly in a motel room alone. The only potential emotions were anger or frustration, both appropriately masculine.
He thought about the girl. She’d been about five or six. He had never hallucinated before. He considered talking to the foreman, but all it would do is get him kicked off the site. It had just been a stupid little blip of his imagination. He should forget about her.
After an hour of Nash’s nonsense grunts, reassuring utterances, and a five-minute goodbye, he hung up the phone. “I’m gonna go down for some grub.” He held the phone out to Cedric. “Need to call anybody?”
Cedric shook his head. “I’m good.”
Nash slid the phone between his box spring and mattress and then left Cedric watching the seventh inning of a game he didn’t care about.
In his fourth-grade Science class, Mrs. Reed pulled up an illustration of an earthworm, tiny labels pointing to each individual pink organ. Septum, gizzard, crop—so many foreign words to Cedric. The familiar words were pointing to masses that looked nothing like the human equivalent. The brain was so tiny and had no wrinkles. And the heart was pointing to tiny rings in the upper part of the creature. And it was labeled “hearts.” Plural.
Cedric had so many questions, but, being a shy kid, he quietly stewed in frustrated confusion. He could maybe muster the courage for a single question. But what he wanted to know was the answers to his soul questions. Would the whole class laugh if Cedric asked which organ held the soul? If he knew, maybe he could figure out the remaining questions on his own without having to ask.
He was slowly beginning to raise his hand when Kenny Price’s hand shot up in the air. Cedric lowered his hand again. Maybe Kenny would ask the question for him.
“Kenneth?” Mrs. Reed said.
“Is it true that if you cut a worm in half, it’ll grow into two worms?”
Cedric leaned in. And where is the soul?
Mrs. Reed smiled as if she had expected this question. “Some worms, yes,” she said. “Like the tapeworm. But not earthworms. The head can regrow the tail, but the tail won’t form a new worm.”
“So the tail just dies?” Kenny asked.
“Yes. Just like if you got your leg amputated, the leg would die, but you could survive. We just can’t regrow our legs.”
Cedric thought of Natasha Blake, who was in the grade above him. She had a prosthetic leg that she showed to people on the playground.
Cedric stuck out his leg for closer analysis. Why wouldn’t part of his soul stay in his leg if it got cut off? If your soul wasn’t in your body, then where was it?
The little girl came back again the next day. This time, he was confident she was a hallucination because she stood on the moving tread of his excavator as he climbed a hill to another area of the dig site.
She stared at him through the closed door of the cab like a cat waiting to be let in.
He tried to ignore her for almost half an hour. He maneuvered the excavator to a stable spot. He started lifting bucket after bucket of dirt and crumbled rock shards to a pile further down the hill where another excavator was loading it into the back of a dump truck.
She continued to watch him patiently. Never speaking, never blinking. She wore a different dress this time. Still flowers, but this time they were daffodils.
“You’re not real,” he said conversationally. If she had been real, she wouldn’t have heard him through the closed door over the roar of the engine.
She continued to stare at him through the dusty glass. After scooping two more buckets, he said, “You’re not real. You’re my imagination.”
“Your imagination is real.” He heard her voice like a whisper in his ear from inches away—loud and soft at the same time. He jerked back in surprise, the resulting motion on the joystick in his hand causing half of the load to fall from his bucket.
He caught his breath. Was it even safe for a person experiencing hallucinations to continue operating heavy machinery? OSHA would probably say no.
The voice came again. He realized the little girl’s mouth wasn’t moving with her words. “I am what you are searching for. I’m the reason you dig.”
“You don’t know me, little miss. I dig for my paycheck.” After he said it, he felt silly. Was he really arguing with his hallucinations? “Leave me alone and let me work.”
“Fine,” she said. “But you’re digging in the wrong place.” Then she disappeared.
* * *
He met Gail through a dating app. No meet-cute. They both swiped right.
On their first date, he told her how he didn’t speak to his mom anymore and how he’d taken a few classes at the community college before getting his CDL and heavy equipment training.
Gail was mixed-race, Black and Puerto Rican, and had graduated with a bachelor’s in art history. She was thinking of going back for a master’s, but until then, she was working in the back office of a furniture store.
After their second date, he stayed over at her apartment.
He told her he loved her on their fifth date because it felt like he was supposed to.
They never officially moved in together, but they took turns staying at each other’s apartments.
They had been dating six months when Gail came out of his bathroom one morning holding a pregnancy test, tears streaming down her cheeks.
It turned out the little girl was right. They were digging in the wrong place. “Scans say we’re off by about forty feet,” the foreman said. He made the machinery drivers back almost a mile down the mountain and wait so demolition could come in and blast in a new spot.
They took an early lunch, and Cedric ate his turkey sandwich in the cab of his excavator. He paused mid-bite. The girl was sitting cross-legged in the bucket at the end of the boom arm. She stared at him through the front glass.
He ate his sandwich slowly, refusing to hurry. He wiped his mouth on a napkin and shoved all his trash into the paper bag. Then he took a long, slow drink from the cold water in his thermos.
“If you’re not my imagination, who are you?” he asked.
“I’m what you are digging for,” she said, her mouth never opening and her lips frozen in a state of neutrality.
“They haven’t told us why we are digging. What’s your name?”
“I do not have a name yet.”
“Why not?”
This seemed to stump her, because she took a few seconds to answer. She gestured at the excavator and asked, “Do you give your machine a name?”
“This one isn’t mine, but I have before.”
“Why?”
“Each one is different. They have personalities.”
“Souls?”
He took his time answering. “I’m not sure I know what a soul is.”
“You are a soul. The soul of this machine.”
Cedric laughed. “I guess.”
In the distance, a dull thud of the detonation rumbled down the mountains and through the trees.
The girl nodded and then disappeared.
He had held Gail’s hand through the ultrasound. The nurse had asked if they wanted to know the sex, and when they said they did, she told them it was a girl. He had several girl names in mind already, but before they even had a chance to discuss them, the nurse made a “hmm” noise.
“It is highly unlikely you will carry to term,” is how the doctor had phrased it.
“What does that mean?” Cedric had asked. “Is she going to die?”
“No, no. You are going to be fine,” the doctor said to Gail. “However, you will most likely miscarry in the coming weeks.”
Cedric did not clarify who he had been asking about.
She dismissed him when he tried to talk about it or make plans. “This isn’t your problem anymore,” she said to him one night during a fight.
Even a strong and loving relationship would not have survived some of the things they said to each other over the following weeks. Looking back, the relationship was over the moment the nurse had said, “hmm.”
They waited for almost thirty minutes to get back to work. But when the foreman finally arrived, it was to tell them that the bus was coming to pick them up. They had the rest of the day off with full pay.
Cedric wasn’t thrilled about more free time with Nash, but he kept his mouth shut. When the bus pulled into the motel parking lot, armed guards were waiting.
All the guys filed out reluctantly between the guards, but when Nash stepped out, they took him by the arm and led him to the main office down the hallway on the first floor.
Cedric climbed the stairs to his room and found the door standing open, sheets strewn on the floor, and Nash’s mattress overturned. The cell phone was gone.
Cedric spent the next hour cleaning up the room and putting everything back in its place. He even made Nash’s bed. It was primarily Nash’s side of the room that had been ransacked, as if they knew what they were looking for.
Around 4 p.m., he got a call on the room phone. He was reluctant to answer at first, but on the thirteenth ring, he picked it up. It was one of the guards downstairs, who told him that all the workers had been asked to stay in tonight and that their dinner would be brought to their rooms. They gave him the option of steak or chicken. He chose steak.
The steak was delivered to his door at 6 p.m., and it was one of the best meals Cedric had ever eaten.
Nash didn’t come back to the room, and Cedric fell asleep around 9 p.m. watching a stand-up comedy series.
He woke early the next morning to a knock on the door, about an hour earlier than he usually got up. He answered it to find two guards, one white and one Black.
He expected them to take him into custody for knowing about Nash’s phone, but instead, the white man asked if they could come in.
He stepped aside to let the two men enter and closed the door behind them.
They stood at the foot of the bed and gestured for him to have a seat.
“I’ll stand,” Cedric said.
The white man gave a sharp nod and said, “Your contract is complete as of 06:00 today. The U.S. government thanks you for your assistance. The full week’s pay has already been deposited into the account listed on file.”
It was kinder than Cedric had expected. He opened his mouth to ask if someone could at least drive him back into town, where he could catch a bus home, when the Black man pulled a stack of papers from behind his back and placed them carefully on the bed.
The white man spoke again. “We would like to offer you a new contract.”
It took a few seconds for the gears in Cedric’s head to realign. “Doing what?” he asked.
“Same site, same job, different contract. You will also be required to sign a new NDA.” The white man gestured at the stack of papers, and Cedric picked them up. It had to be at least fifty pages. He started leafing through it.
“I already signed an NDA. I meant it the first time. Why wasn’t that one good enough?”
“This NDA has a more severe punishment for breaking it. Felony and treason charges with jail time of up to twenty years.”
Cedric opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again while he looked for the words. Finally, he said, “Why the hell would I sign that?”
“Page nineteen.”
Cedric flipped to the page where the compensation was listed. He stared at the number for a long time, counting the zeros. He looked up at the two men, their faces plaster casts of neutrality. “Two million dollars?”
The white man nodded. Silence filled the room for several seconds, the only sound the hum of the air-conditioning unit below the window.
“I won’t do anything unethical,” Cedric said. “That’s too much money for someone to just dig a hole. I’m not putting anybody in that hole, just so you know.”
“This figure simply compensates you for a lifetime of secrecy. The job will be exactly the same as it was yesterday; you can just never talk about it. Not even with the other people on the site. You are digging for something. You will refer to that something only as the object. Once the object is retrieved, you’re free to go about your life. But if you ever speak of it, there will be extreme consequences.”
Cedric flipped through the pages and then looked up at them. “Anything else I need to know?”
“You should probably read the whole document.”
“Yeah, probably,” Cedric said, then picked up a pen from the bedside table with the name of a bail bondsman printed on it, signed the document, and handed it back across the bed.
The men took the document and walked to the door. “The bus leaves for the dig at 07:30.”
Cedric showered and made it downstairs in time to grab a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and black coffee from the breakfast bar before getting on the bus. The bus was only half as full as it had been the day before. No one talked.
The excavators were still parked down the hill where they’d left them the day before. The operators found their machines and drove them back up the mountain to the dig.
The new hole was filled with shards of broken limestone and dirt. And something else. Cedric stared at it for a long time. It was nearly the size of his excavator and black as slate. Such a familiar shape at such an inappropriate scale. But there was no denying that it was clearly a hand. Four fingers and a thumb, still submerged in the dirt up to the palm.
And standing on the tip of the index finger was the little girl.
Cedric moved his excavator forward to the lip of the hole and started scooping out the surrounding rubble.
He had been sleeping on the couch for two weeks when Gail came out of the bedroom and told him she needed to go to the hospital.
He sat in the waiting room for two hours before a nurse came and got him. Gail was in a hospital bed, asleep. She woke up when he took her hand, careful not to touch the IV drip in her forearm.
They looked at each other for a long time. He didn’t know what to ask. She didn’t volunteer any information. Finally, he asked, “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“The baby?”
She shook her head, then leaned back in the bed and closed her eyes. “I’d like to be alone now,” she said.
* * *
Cedric was surprised to see the girl on the quiet bus ride back to the motel. Her head poked up from two seats in front of him and stared at him all the way down the mountain.
She stayed on the bus as he exited, but she was standing at the foot of Nash’s bed when he entered the room. He grabbed a change of clothes and a towel and went into the bathroom without a word, hoping she’d at least give him enough privacy to shower.
She was still there when he came out.
“You will be our soul,” she said.
“Is that a question?” he asked, looking for the remote in the end table drawer. It was unnerving that her mouth never moved when she talked.
“You are the soul of the digging machine. You can be our soul.”
“No,” he said. “I’m just the operator; I make it move. I tell it what to do.”
“Yes,” she said with an uptick of her voice as if they had come to some sort of agreement.
“Are you telling me you don’t have a soul? Whatever you are, you’re obviously alive.”
“Do you believe that all living things have a soul? Even the worms that crawl in the ground?”
He paused, staring at the girl. “How did you know that?”
“We want you to be our soul. We will be the mind, and you will be the soul.”
“No. I’m not qualified for that. I don’t even believe in souls.”
He turned on the TV and ignored the little girl, who continued to stare at him from the bottom of the bed. After about thirty minutes, he asked her to leave him alone and give him some privacy for the rest of the night. With a nod of her head, she disappeared.
Gail didn’t want to talk about it—not to Cedric, her momma, or the nurses. When the nurses asked if they wanted to put a name on the birth certificate, Gail said, “She wasn’t born.”
“It’s called a Certificate of Birth Resulting in a Stillbirth. You don’t have to. I can just put baby girl if you’d rather.” The nurse looked from face to face for an answer. Gail’s parents were looking at Cedric, and it took a second before he realized he was the only other person with the authority to answer the question.
Cedric’s grandmama had been named Rose. And she’d had two girls that she’d named Iris and Lilly.
“Daisy,” he said.
Gail’s eyes were closed, but he saw her lips tighten as she struggled to hold back tears.
When she was released from the hospital, Gail’s parents took her home with them.
It rained for the next three days, making Cedric’s job much more difficult. By that point, they had unearthed the “object” up to the forearm.
The little girl stood inside the cab now. Even though he knew his arm would pass through her, Cedric still did his best to give her space. Eight hours is a long time, so conversations were inevitable.
“Why don’t you already have a soul?”
“The old souls are gone.”
“How old are you?”
“We came here before life on this planet formed.”
“Millions of years?”
“Yes.”
“Then why a little girl?”
She paused. “We appear to you as a little girl?” she asked.
The static of the radio interrupted his answer. “Number three, halt dig.”
Two guards, not the same two who had come to his room—both of these guys were white—walked out in the rain and gestured for him to exit the excavator. He didn’t really want to get wet, but he got out anyway.
“You have been observed speaking. Who are you speaking to?” the first asked as the second climbed into his cab and started searching the corners and under the seat.
“I’m singing. Talking to myself. You ever spent an eight-hour shift in a little box? Gets boring, and the radio signal sucks out here.”
The second guard leaned out of the cab. “All clear.” He then leaned in and attached a camera to the ceiling, pointing directly at Cedric’s chair.
“Carry on,” the first soldier said.
“. . . my wayward son,” Cedric sang as they walked away. They didn’t laugh or respond. He climbed back into the cab, dripping.
As he closed the door, the little girl reappeared.
“You do not have to talk with your mouth,” she said, her lips never moving. “You can talk to me the way I talk to you.”
His eyes darted up to the camera. He wondered if he watched the footage back, would he still see her?
He looked straight ahead and thought the words. “You can hear my thoughts.”
“Only the ones you project outward. That is how we found you. You think outwardly more than any of the rest.”
His stepfather had given him more than one beating for thinking outwardly. Emotions were something to be hidden around him. Tamped down and tamed. Cedric continued to dig, removing a rock that caused a small landslide of mud and muck, revealing another yard of forearm.
“You are the brain of this thing?” he thought at her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Can you make it move? Like, just make the pinky finger wiggle a little?”
“No,” she said. “I can think and communicate. Only a soul can act.”
The last time he saw Gail was at the burial. She had refused to call it that and didn’t want to have a service at all, but her mother had insisted. She even arranged for a grave site in one of the family plots in Meadow View Cemetery.
The day before the burial, Cedric went to Meadow View and walked around until he found two men standing at a utility shed. It took about twenty minutes to convince them, but finally, they gave him a shovel and mattock.
“We have a backhoe,” the older of the two guys said. Cedric declined.
This wasn’t supposed to be easy.
The hole was small but deep. The two guys watched him dig for close to two hours.
When he was done, the younger guy helped him up out of the hole. Cedric was covered in rich, dark soil and sweat. His muscles in his back and arms ached, but not nearly enough.
* * *
It had been raining for three days, and they were almost to the elbow. The arm trailed back at a diagonal angle into the mountain. Cedric tried to picture how the whole form looked under the dirt. What contorted pose had it been sleeping in all these years?
He was the last of the excavators at this hole. The others had been moved to another site a hundred yards down the other side of the mountain. He assumed that meant more of the figure had been unearthed.
“They are looking for the entrance,” the girl said.
He realized she had never told him her name, so he thought the question at her again.
“I have had many names. Many souls. The soul gives us the name.”
Cedric moved the excavator forward. The treads slipped in the mud, and the excavator rocked to the side.
The machine continued to slide slowly down the hill, turning sideways. He reacted on instinct and adrenaline, digging the arm and bucket into the mud, but it didn’t stop the slide. Cedric opened the door and jumped out and away as far as he could. He hit the mud on a slope, the sharp rocks digging into his skin as his fingers clawed to slow his slide. The angle was too steep, and slowly he careened down the side of the hill, smacking his shin on an extended rock.
Then he lost the upward direction as he tumbled. He was no longer able to measure the distance, just the length of time he tumbled. Each impact with the ground hurt, but the pain all melded together into a single agony.
Eventually, he realized he had stopped falling. The mud on his skin cooled his throbbing side. He lay there for minutes, catching his breath, attempting to wiggle different parts of his body to see what was still working.
He lay in the cold, wet mud, listening to the distant noises of the mountains, the raindrops plinking on the leaves and in the mud. The serenity was a sharp contrast to the violence that had preceded it.
They would come for him soon, wouldn’t they? They would piece him back together. It was at that moment that Cedric thought for the first time that they could have put ten million dollars on the contract; it wouldn’t matter if they had no intention of him surviving the dig.
He moved his head to look up the hill, crumbles of dirt trickling down the sticky, muddy slope.
The girl stood in front of him.
“You are hurt,” she said, “But your soul is intact.”
He thought of the worm, wiggling in the dirt. He had covered it back up. How long had it lived after that?
He tried to speak, and it took his breath away. He thought at her instead. “It isn’t. I don’t have a soul anymore.”
“You do.”
“How do you know?”
“Because souls hurt.”
“My body hurts.”
“Not like your soul. A soul screams with agony. It yearns for things it knows can never be. A soul does not rely on logic to decide. These injuries to your flesh will heal. Your soul will ache forever.”
She kneeled beside him. “I am a mind without a spirit. A life without a will. If I am to live, I need you.”
The droplets of rain pooled in his eyes and streamed down his face, intermingled with tears. He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded.
* * *
The preacher had said so many words that Cedric had a hard time believing at that moment. All the talk of shepherds and lying down in green pastures when Daisy had never drawn a breath.
Cedric sat next to Gail under the black tent, clutching the tiny piece of paper in his lap with Daisy’s name and a picture of a dove printed on it. The card had an obituary that defined her by her connections to other people—those who had preceded her in death and those who were left to grieve her. What else could they write? How else could you describe an unlived life?
A soul untarnished? A soul unfinished?
When the ceremony was completed, people milled about, shaking hands and expressing their grief. Slowly, everyone drifted back to their cars and drove away.
Gail’s mom had told him that there would be food back at their house. He nodded and thanked her. Gail got in the back seat of the SUV, and they drove away. She never looked back at him.
When everyone was gone, the two groundskeepers came to the edge of the graveside to meet him. He took the shovel from the old guy’s hand, and as they deconstructed the tent, he uncovered the pile of dirt beside the grave.
One shovel at a time, he let the dirt sift down on the tiny casket as he buried his Daisy.
He felt warm air on his face and opened his eyes. A hole had opened into the side of the muddy hill.
He blinked away the raindrops and looked up at the girl standing beside the opening.
“You’re almost there,” she said.
His ribs hurt, and his left arm was weak, but he managed to drag himself into the hole and out of the rain. Each inch uncovered new pains, new parts of his body that were not functioning as they were supposed to. He progressed deeper into the Earth, and at times, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was burrowing into his own grave.
The canal wasn’t long, only a few dozen yards, but it took him nearly an hour before he felt his head break through into the warm air of the cavern.
He fell forward onto the floor and lay there, unable to catch his breath for a long time.
The little girl appeared above him again. “You are dying,” she said. “Just a little further.” She gestured deeper into the cave. He turned his head and saw a massive, curved wall of black, the same material as the hand he had spent the last week uncovering.
He was growing weaker, and parts of his body were numb. He couldn’t crawl, so he pushed himself over and rolled across the floor toward the shiny black surface.
On the last roll, he flopped onto his back and extended his shaky hand. His fingers grazed the shell, and a bolt of cold lightning flowed through him, and everything went white.
He had looked Gail up on social media a few months earlier. She had gone back to school, not for art history but something in business. He scrolled twice and stopped on a picture of her in a recliner that he recognized from her mother’s house. A husky Black man stood beside her, and she was holding a baby that was, at most, a few months old. Cedric was happy for her. For the baby, for the new man in her life, for being able to move on.
The post read, “Julia, my heart and my soul.”
He felt his body pulled forward in space, and then he was standing in a room not much larger than his motel room. The dull aches from his side and extremities were fading like an echo. He gasped for breath, and his lungs filled with refreshing air.
He tested his legs by taking a cautious step forward and found them to be strong and reliable. He ran his fingers along the fresh new skin that covered his wounds and felt the tingle of a healing scar.
A panel of gauges, buttons, and screens surrounded the room. The little girl stood near the panel. She was quiet, giving him time to explore the room. He analyzed the buttons and controls, trying to decipher the cryptic marks and symbols.
“We have slept for so long waiting for a soul,” she said. “Waiting for you.”
“You healed me?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “We can do many things.”
“But not all of me.” He sat down hard on a bench near the control panel. “There are still lots of things about me that are broken.” He felt a stinging in his eyes that he hadn’t felt in years. “I think my soul was torn in half once.”
She nodded. “And that is why you see me as a little girl?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what to do. How am I supposed to be your soul when I don’t even know how to be my own?”
“It is for you to decide who we become—who you become. I can provide any knowledge you need, but the decisions belong to the soul.” She gestured to a platform in the middle of the room. A pair of black boots and long black gloves hovered in the space.
He approached one of the screens, which displayed a schematic of the machine he was currently in, labeled with ancient symbols he couldn’t read. He thought of the worm drawing from Mrs. Reed’s class. “Hearts,” he thought. Plural.
Can a soul be regrown?
“What did other souls do?” he asked. “The old ones?”
“We have been the aggressor,” she said. “We are good at that. We are good at rage and destruction. That was why those you worked for wanted us. But we have been many other things. We have been builder, explorer, protector.”
“Are we the only one?” Cedric asked.
“No,” she said.
“How many?”
“Hundreds.”
Cedric walked to the platform in the middle of the room. He slid his right hand into the glove. “Excavator?” he asked. “Finder of lost things hidden in the dirt.”
Cedric stepped up onto the control platform. He put his feet into the boots, one at a time, and slid his arm into the left glove. He could feel the power in the machine. So much responsibility. If other machines were unearthed, they would need someone broken like him.
“We were once Healer.”
“Healer. I like that,” he said. He curled and uncurled his index finger and could feel the cool air and rain that fell on his hand as his enormous fingers wiggled up through the mud and rock above.