For Aaron


If a dog barks twice in the night, it means the sun will rise tinged with blue on the horizon. Five times, and it is a fox the dog is after. Eight means the dog caught the fox and nine means the chase will keep on going and weaving through the birch. Braids of bark and fur. Even from here I can hear this.

Where I am is dark and thick and sweet; it completely covers me. Rain reaches me and covers me. An insect finds me and moves on, another comes and curls into a spiral against me, its belly full of tiny, translucent cricket eggs that it stole to eat along the way. To this insect, I am a resting place and to the rain I am a body and to the dog barking in the night, I am invisible.

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He buried me in the soil what feels like long ago. Time is lackluster here and I can tell it passes by how warm the earth gets and then how cold. When I think about it, he buried me three times, moving me from one place to another until he found this spot. Here in the soil, one must become observant of even the slightest shifts. The slightest shifts change everything.

The mica is a star, the soil a sky. My sky. My sky drips over me, cool brown fresh water, mica stars, the broken leg of a centipede. It all washes over me, the leg sticks to my skin, the mica lands just in front of me: its shimmer keeps me company. I delight in this. I feel alive. I feel as if I could breathe or reach a limb up through the layers of dirt packed above, wet with rain, and punch through my sky only to arrive under another open faraway one. One that is a wilderness of light.

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A dog barks once, nearby. I am buried beside several others. Where we are, none of us speak, our mouths are not mouths, our ears are not ears. We listen to know that we are not alone, to know there is another, many others. The soil is what tells me.

Soil communicates when it is full, when it is dry, when it has space to receive. Soil is speaking all the time. Soil sounds like an echo filled; it is a low groaning and a series of whistles when the wind is strong. Sound bounces off of each of our bodies under the soil, and then returns to me full of different densities, and this is what lets me know there is another, there are many others, buried all around. Each of us is a different size and weight, our curvatures distinct and caked with dirt embedded into the folds of our forms and wrinkles, our fibrous layers and ridges.

He buried us all at different times, and still he buries more, with his long dirt-caked fingers and short dull nails and the green of his green eyes.

The last things I remember: his bare hands, rough with soil, raw from holding the wooden handle of his shovel. And one eye the size of a pebble, the color of wet grass. I had never met him before, and he held me like a speckled egg in his hands. He placed me on the ground before his digging began. He whistled a little, different than the wind, something more melodic, something piercing and clear and it whittled at me with its sharpness. He did this all without gloves, because he likes the texture of us mixed with the earth and with the smooth wood of his shovel’s handle. The shovel’s handle grainy with the mineral and soil he has spent hours shucking at, within.

The man is nimble and moves about the ground with delicate precision, like a robin, like a wren. He steps lightly, he is careful. In not stepping over the soil where he has already buried us, he avoids tamping us down even further.

He is tall and he is considerate. He steps around and around and moves in the same spiral shape as the insect still curled up against me. Calendrical and deliberate, with shoulders shaped like his shovel, he moves with pleasure all around us and above us, his footsteps reverberating through the soil and filling each of us with its rhythm.

At first it all seemed so random, this man and this ritual, but he is not a random man. He is cautious, even caring, burying us under certain kinds of lunar cycles, under certain patterns of stars. He is not what you think with his eyes like wet grass, with his hands that are earthy that are gentle.

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Today the sun tinges the belly of the earth blue where it rises. A fox trots above me, leaving a few orange hairs beside a perfect print in the mud, enough for the dog to scent out later.

Where we are is dark and thick and sweet; it completely covers us.

Buried in the earth we are invisible, and we are waiting. And he is waiting. Waiting for us to surface under enough rain, enough sun, enough weather. Waiting for us to emerge, his work revealed, his green eyes like wet grass grazing over the ground. I can feel them even from here, from where I am, my life an echo filled and buried deep enough down.

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What haunts me is that I do not know what will become of me. At times, I have premonitions. These premonitions come in colors and shapes, mostly, but sometimes I feel as if I can almost smell something. One day, I saw the shape of a saucer, the color mauve. Another time I saw myself spiraling, spiraling, traveling over a fence in a mess of greenery with purplish discs that looked like large, salty gems. I felt ornamental that day and it let my worries surrender back into the tight casing deep within me. And not long after, I felt as if a flap of fast wings had come near to me, and they smelled of sugar water hot with the sun.

I have begun to wonder if the others have premonitions or if they know already what will become of them, what will become of each of us. The mycelium stretches around us like filigree, and it pulses and it grows. It tightens the soil, brings it closer to me. I have begun to savor this feeling and the density of the dirt enclosed upon my form.

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There are times as of late that I feel I could reach out to pull the dirt closer in around me and it thrills me. It thrills me and I know I am more alive than I ever was before. Even from here, packed down under the earth, I know I am more alive than when he held me in his bare hands under the broad sky while the curdling sound of his whistle helped to bury me underground.

It is as if the longer I am buried here, the clearer my life becomes, as if I were always meant to be here. And I am stronger, too. My body has changed from a primordial shape into something more delicate and defined. I can curl up out of myself and I know that given enough time, I will reach the sunlit surface above me.

He is walking around us now, he is kneeling just beyond me, the pressure of his weight ripples the soil and makes me quiver. He hovers over us and inspects the ground. He chews on a twig of the birch tree and pulls a wild geranium from its place in the ground so nearby me that the soil chatters and dissevers before reorienting in its muted and compact comfort again.

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What had once made me superstitious about him now only delights me. I have even stopped counting the barking dogs.

I stopped counting the dogs when I broke through the surface in a garden and saw the sun rise for the first time in an opera of saffron. The whole world lifted, and the sky splayed out before me, and the fox stepped through a hole in the fence without paying me any mind.

Chanelle Allesandre writes poetry and prose, makes flower essences, and creates improvisational, atmospheric soundscapes. For the past few years, she has been creating a Literary Garden on the campus of Meredith College in Raleigh, NC and writing a descriptive guide to accompany it. The garden is full of therapeutic & culinary plants found in works of literature. Previously published works can be read via: The 4 Poets, Deluge, ÖMËGÄ, Dirt Child, Voices & Visions Journal, The Colton Review, and Rabid Oak.