The Hole
This story is a slight departure for me. The images are youthful, but the message and the language will resonate with anybody whose future lay before them.
For this Boy and this Girl, particularly the Girl, were a creative pair, painting their rustic outdoor canvas with the bustling happenings of a Broadway theater in full swing. The shows were always fanciful, with polar bear players and tap dancing ducks, and were always set to musical numbers that defied all the norms of melody or pitch.
But on this day, thus far like all the others, the journey to their sunlit stage was interrupted - and as the Boy was just finding out - so had the Girl's dreams the night before.
"There I was," the Girl told, dreamily fingering her strawberry hair clip, "seated in my red-cushioned chair among all the reporters, their pens excitedly telling the story of the night's festivity, all of us waiting for my big debut..."
Crunch, went the Boy, half deafened by the crispy apple he was eating, "then what happened?"
"The Orchestra flourishes," the Girl went on, "the audience applauds, the rope is pulled, but then - when the velvet curtains finally twitch aside, there's..."
"A hole?" the Boy broke in.
"Well, not exactly, but..."
"No, look!"
They had stopped walking, and fortunately so, for true to his word, just in front of them was a great, circular hole, right in the center of the clearing.
More curious than frightened, the two of them quickly and carefully walked it 'round, closely examining its perfect darkness and neatly formed curves, just wide enough to reach across the middle and touch with one finger and one toe. They peered in...nothing. The Boy grasped through the darkness from the edge...nothing. Finally, they firmly concluded that this was indeed, but no more than, a perfectly hole-ish hole.
"I've never seen anything like it," mused the Girl.
"Never seen a hole?" quipped the Boy. "Though, I suppose no one ever really sees a hole. A hole is nothing. And you can't see nothing."
"Of course I've seen a hole," she said.
"Were you expecting a hole?" he followed.
"Who expects a hole?" she retorted.
The Boy was lost in thought. "I think we need to look at this more..." and he paused, "hole-istically."
The Girl only stared in reply, flaring an eyebrow.
"Well," continued the Boy, "what are holes for?"
"I don't know," she said. "For holding stuff."
"Exactly," triumphed the Boy. "But we don't know how big it is, so we can't know what's down there yet." And with a quick glance around, he came up with a small rock, approached the edge, and threw it hard downward. As it vanished, they both bent low and listened.
A few moments later, they had still heard no sound till, all of a sudden there was a quick rustle above, as the very same rock came flitting through the tree above and with a sharp thud hit the Boy right on the crown.
"Aaargh!" he yelled, stumbling backwards. "Who did that? Somebody threw that rock back at me!" He had also, as the Girl noticed with a chuckle, dropped his apple, which tumbled over the ground and disappeared.
Before the Girl could react to any of this, he was running straight at the hole, as if to chase his phantom stone-thrower to its depths, when suddenly, it moved. The Girl stood astonished, but the Boy, quite heated, was not daunted in his pursuit.
Enraged, he ran at the hole again and again, but each time he tried, it slipped quickly away, just far enough to avoid his pounce, but always remained in the clearing. Finally, the Boy took a new approach: he ran a few steps off route, launched himself off a half-buried rock, and attempted to drop directly into the bull's-eye of his target.
This hole, however, seeming to be keen to his aerial maneuver, immediately shrank down, but not before he had plunged in up to his waist, leaving him helplessly half buried in the grassy ground.
"Help!" called the Boy, "It's going to eat me! I'll be buried alive!"
"Oh I dunno," she replied thoughtfully, "I've never planted a doofus tree before. I think I'll gather some water from the stream. Can't have you drying out!"
"THAT'S NOT FUNNY GET ME OUT OF THIS HOLE RIGHT NOW OR I'LL YANK OFF YOUR NOSE AND CATCH A FISH WITH IT!" But even as he was shouting himself into a reddish color she had already begun to lift him out, the hole relaxing a bit for her and allowing the Boy to slip free. "I'LL FILL IT IN! I'LL GET A DUMP TRUCK! YOU'LL SEE!"
The Boy continued to rant, stomping in circles as if to disturb the peace of these underground rock-throwers, but the Girl sat down with her chin in her hand, staring off in thought. Things stood this way for some time, until, just as the Boy had finished the last epithets he could think of, she got to her feet and cautiously approached the edge.
"Shh" she ordered to the Boy, "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to fix a bad temper?" With that she crept forward on her hands, and put her face close to the darkness. "This song always used to help me when I was little." She took a breath, and sang:
Where have you gone to dear,
Come sing to me, for I long to hear,
Of yellow birds, and friendly faces,
And through your words, I'll see those places...
- But she stopped, looking crestfallen. "I can't remember the rest."
The Boy, still brushing the earth off his arms and appearing quite ready to leave, began: "well that's just fine with me. Now that we've had our performance for the day I think it's about time we -" and he stopped, staring at the hole. They both were. For rising up from it came a sound. Still nothing to see, but a voice - a woman's voice, echoed from within, seeming to reply with the Girl's very same song.
"She sounds beautiful!" cried the Girl. "But-she stopped too." And the voice had, for a short while, but then it began again, repeating the last line as though searching for what came next. "I can help her!" proclaimed the Girl. "I can remember I know it!"
Hardly aware of her own Boyish tendencies, the Girl shimmied face-first toward the brink of the darkness, clutched the earthen edge, took a deep breath and lowered herself from the waist down.
She had shut her eyes, so she saw especially nothing, but felt quite a lot of cool breeze, far-off warmth as if she were under the sun, that same voice singing with much greater clarity, and then bop, something struck her right on the head.
"Aye!" she exclaimed, looking up. And when she did, a number of other things struck her immediately. For starters, she was outside.
"This is different," she thought aloud, her voice shaking.
Looking at her hands, she realized she was no longer dangling, but actually clutching the side of the ground, coming out of the hole she'd just gone into. Glancing around, she noticed she was also in exactly the same spot as before, in the clearing, but judging by the light carpet of leaves rattling through the grass and the slight chill in the air, some time had passed since the summer.
She searched the scene for some other clue as to what had happened, until her eye stopped on an odd glint among the leaves, which, on focusing her eyes, appeared to be an apple -a whole, un-bitten one. It was bruised on one side, and the Girl winced as she felt the presumably matching bruise on her head. As she did so she glanced up, and saw something entirely new-just a few paces back to her right, was a full-grown, heavily laden apple tree.
"This is very different."
Then, as the wind grew stronger and made the apples sway on their branches, the sound of a woman's voice carried itself to her again.
"She's here!" exclaimed the Girl, and listening harder, "and she's still looking for the end of my song!" Quickly she hoisted herself out of the hole, got to her feet, and was ready to run toward the direction of the sound, when she recalled the images of the Boy, stuck, and feared that it might close on her, too. So she searched the brush until she found a big enough stick, and laid it across the circle, so that she might hear a sound to warn her if it decided to trap her here.
Her alarm set, she listened again, felt which way the wind hit her face, and decided on a direction to follow. She ran breathlessly to the edge of the clearing, around a fallen tree and over a patch of mud, until the voice seemed so close she figured the Woman must be just beyond the next cluster of trees. She stepped carefully and quietly, avoiding stray twigs and dried leaves, until finally after what seemed like several minutes she reached one of the trunks and peered into the small clearing beyond.
I didn't know this was here, the Girl thought to herself. It was similar to its neighbor, with its leafy trees and grass, but much more...personal. A stream passing nearby created a soothing resonance that made the Girl drowsy. There, seated on a high hump in the grass was a woman, much older than she, studying a piece of paper, streaked across with what appeared to be bars of music. She hummed the Girl's tune again and again and repeated its final words, as if earnestly searching the musical cosmos for what ought to follow. The Girl combed her own memories, casting blindly for the second half that had once meant so much to her. She rubbed her bruise and tugged at her strawberry clip as she thought, but coming up with only far-off, muffled syllables.
I wonder how long I've been gone to everyone at home, the Girl began to worry. They'd be in a fit if they knew I'd wandered like this...wander, wonder - that's it! She grinned in personal triumph as the remaining lines flooded back to her, and to her surprise, as she played it through in her head, the woman beyond began to sing it, too...
For a door is just a wall, until you've gone through,
So open them all, and find someplace new,
And wander and wonder, go over and under
To find one as wonderful as you
And as the woman sang she wrote, penning the melody onto the sheet music in her hand. She looked it over, tracing the notes with her finger, and eased herself into a relaxed position with her eyes closed. The Girl still stood where she had been watching, quite moved by this song that the two of them seemed to share, when she heard another sound, a ways off behind her.
"The hole!" the Girl muttered to herself. The stick was breaking. She wasted no time, and took off running in the other direction, doing her best not to make noise and disturb the scene she had left behind. Before plunging back into the big clearing she took one more glance back toward the woman, who was now getting up from her spot on the hill, and noticed something on the other side of her head-she was wearing a strawberry-shaped hair clip, too.
Not having any real time to consider what she had seen, the Girl turned back toward the clearing, and this time broke into an unbridled sprint. As she approached the stick was falling through the ground in two-pieces, the hole now only inches wider than she. She was nearly there now, with only moments left to spare, and out of desperation shut her eyes and made a full on, head-first dive into the darkness.
Seconds passed, and she felt nothing. There was no impact, no sounds, no anything.
"Where on EARTH did you get off to?" came the Boys voice.
She opened her eyes. She was in the clearing again-but this time there was no apple tree, no singing. She was back in her own time.
"What did you see in there?!" he cried in a frenzy, "You were gone for ages! I was starting to think I'd have to walk back home by myself!"
Her mind was spinning, and her skull still aching, but she was grateful to be back. She tried to focus on what the Boy was saying, but was cut short when she felt her hand curl over an edge just behind her. Looking past her shoulder, she was startled to find that she was laying right near the edge of the same, gaping circle.
"It's still here!" she blurted.
"Of course it's still here," replied the Boy. "It and I both. You went in, nothing happened, and I was stuck here, by myself, waiting till you came back. I'm getting hungry. Have you seen my apple?"
But the Girl had long since stopped listening, and was replaying everything she had seen: the woman, the song, her hair...
"I think I know what to do," she said finally, and she took off running for the town. Looking back, she yelled "guard the hole!"
"You've got to be kidding me," the Boy muttered, and just as he began to search the ground for things he could grab, she also yelled, "and don't throw anything into it!"
She moved as fast as her legs would let her, hoping to reach the town and get back again before it got too dark to see. An hour passed, and when she finally did reach the clearing again, she found the hole where it had always been, and the Boy sound asleep in the grass. Judging by his bare sock and the shoe dangling by its shoestrings in the tree above, he had ignored her warning.
She came back carrying a bag, and quickly opened it to reveal a brand new, unopened notebook. She took out a pen, flipped to its first page, and began writing.
"What are you doing?" the Boy asked, half in a yawn. Several leaves had fallen on his face.
"No more dreaming," she said, and after several minutes of earnest scribbling, turned the notebook to reveal the floor plans of a small, fully functioning stage in their own clearing.
"We have work to do," she said, and the Boy nodded in bewildered agreement.
The two of them stayed there a long time that night, and filled page after page of her notebook with drawings and ideas for their first real play, one which the whole town could come to the clearing to see-it was some time before they even noticed that the hole they discovered had crept away, and upon that spot her dreams finally became a reality.
Fill your blanks, plant a seed, and create something beautiful.
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