disturbance of dirt

by Brooks Egerton

It is no bigger than a fire ant mound, really, in the far corner of an iron-fenced park that nobody much visits — a slice of city property where a thickset teenage girl sometimes communes with statues of manacled men and shackled women, where she transmutes the roar of Central Expressway into a river and the rumble of the Love Field flight path into the wind.

Everybody buying beer across the street has no time to read the historical marker that stands askew near the park gate and explains, in the gentlest governmental terms, how thousands of freedmen and freedwomen once lived around here, and were buried more or less where the imaginary reader is standing, and were paved over decades ago in deference to the metastasizing freeway, and were later dug up and moved to some presumably more final resting places.

Rose, however, has time. She can recite every word on the plaque. And as twilight and two days of rain come to a concurrent close, she is the embodied ghost in gray sweatpants trudging across the Lemmon Avenue overpass and down the frontage road’s rarely used sidewalk toward Calvary Lane.

Surely a motorist or two catches a glimpse of her. Maybe one of them even wonders who she is, where she’s going. But nobody attaches any significance to the plastic grocery bag she carries, much less imagines that it holds the largest spoon in her mother’s kitchen and a tiny fetus the girl expelled, hours earlier, into a toilet that nobody much scrubs.

Once the interment is complete, she presses her forehead to the wet ground, inhales the sweet dark churning work of earthworms, squeezes her eyes shut, pictures her mother’s gap-toothed boyfriend and the drawer where the spoon belongs and the butcher knife that also lives there.

Photo of Brooks Egerton

BIO: Brooks Egerton is the organizer of Sewanee Spoken Word. His other work, fiction and non, lives at AC|DC, BULL, Chapter 16, D Magazine, and The Dallas Morning News.