by Craig Rodgers
Billy swings the hammer. A big crusher of a thing. Feet of wood stem with a fat hunk of iron wedged on the end.
Remodeling, he calls it. It’s cheaper this way, he says. Opening up the room between kitchen and den. Some jargon name for this he saw on a show. Shared space. Dual use. Something. He swings the hammer again.
Things are moved out of the way. Household staples dragged. An end table, framed photos. Buckets of English ivy that once hung are set in a corner. Things waiting for a new equilibrium.
Plaster falls with each boom. He hits the same spot over and over. A hole appears and spreads. The structure underneath. He goes on swinging, pounding. Cursing and grunting and on.
There is a crack, a noise more fragile now. A thing shuttering all through. Billy lets down the sledge, where it wobbles and settles and sits. He leans down to look in the hole.
There is a darkness. He leans more still and a hint of light shows. But the smell. He presses close.
“Hon?”
Soft footfalls come. Amber. She says hey, she says what. He talks.
“Can you smell this?”
“Bill, hon, what?”
“Just come look.”
“Are you doing something gross?”
“I’m not joking. There’s a smell.”
She steps over the mess and leans down and breathes. She looks at him and breathes again.
“What the hell?”
“That’s weird, right?”
“Is it poison? I read poisons smell sweet.”
“I don’t think it’s poison. I think it smells like grass.”
Her eyes fall closed as she breathes. One hand picks at loose plaster.
“That’s so weird,” she says.
_____
It’s like a chainsaw. Some kind of jagged machine. He cuts at ragged edges and wall falls away and beyond this another layer waits. He steps back and then around to the side of the existing partition and he frowns. The fractured barrier shows an inner depth. He knocks away loose parts. He tries to enter the space. Crawling.
The first thing he feels is a heat. This little cubby. He wipes his face with a hand and he scoots. An inner wall shows cracks from his knocking. He turns and braces and he gives one hard kick. Plaster goes flying and then light comes.
“Oh. Shit.”
_____
The hole doesn’t show onto the den. The space beyond the shattered wall is open grassland. A soft breeze shuffles limbs. Animal noise hums. Bugs, other things. Wafting green leans under foreign sun. Billy shifts and turns and puts his face near the hole.
The air is jungle hot. The land ahead shows swaying fields of some alien grain. Maybe it has a name known but Billy doesn’t know. He looks around with a face stupid and shaken. He touches wood to make sure. The house is still here, he is still in the house. In the house’s middle, looking onto a grassland beyond. A little at a time he backs away.
_____
He pretends it’s fine for a day and another day. He doesn’t quite look that way going by. When she asks he says I’m going to get to it, I’m going to get back to it. The wood needs a different kind of support is all. I’m gonna get to it, I promise.
On the third day he finds her looking. He can’t find her and then he does. Sitting down in the hole. Staring.
“Billy? What is this?”
He crawls in behind. The smell is the first thing he notices. The change. Old mud now. Like a slap. He leans and he looks and the land has become something else. A pall has replaced the waving grasses, the green and reaching life now fallen over and gray. Here and there a patch of some familiar clover shows, and in the distance some bizarre pink thing rises in sprouts. The ground below is a wet black thing.
“I don’t understand.”
He pulls her back from the hole.
“It’s nothing.”
She turns wide eyes his way. Horror.
“Nothing?”
“Come on out of here. I just need to patch up the wall.”
“You’re going to patch it up?”
“That’s all I need to do.”
“Bill?”
“It’s fine.”
“Bill, what is this?”
He touches her arm until she turns and then he leads her back into the house proper.
“It’s just a hole in the wall. That’s all it is.”
_____
He wakes with red eyes. Touching, pressing. He clears his throat in hard chugs. Early morning light shows through blinds. He touches her hip and she moans and rolls away.
He pads to the bathroom and pisses and coughs and he spits into the toilet waiting. Snot and blood there. He stares. He hears her moaning again. Words. Babe. Babe?
Machine noise begins somewhere. A buzzing. Leaf blower, chainsaw, something. Babe? He’s moving through rooms in a haze. Is this a fever? Illness? He turns a corner and moves down a hall and he passes by the hole in the wall and tries not to look but he does look and a growth black and wet creeps in all directions from that cave.
Onward. The front door waits ahead. That machine noise still. And back the way he came, Babe? Stumbling steps. His breath labored, squeezed.
He turns the knob and pushes out and he braces for a breath fresh and deep he expects but it doesn’t come, and now he is gagging, and he is bending.
Landscapers move along the street in pairs. Industrial grade masks obscure the faces they turn to look. They move one with a weed eater and another with a pumped spray, marching up one side of the street and down the other, together attacking with a focused vigor the many patches of some pink and rising thing showing in sprouts all along the way for blocks ahead.
Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.