How to Dig a Hole
Exclusive Short Story 6
From the Writer’s Room
This month I’m doing a targeted batch of books to review. They’re all members of The Dark Veil Society, an interesting community of indie horror writers. The stories are good, but I may have over committed and it is slowing my writing progress.
My main writing task for this month is completing the 3rd revision of The Ante. It’s been a bear so far as I’m completely changing the POV and significantly changing a B-plot. But in the end I think it will be a better story for it.
After that, I have an idea for a Domestic Suspense meets Techno Thriller that I want to get into a rough outline. The horror novel I finished outlining has promise, but I don’t think there is as big a market for it right now, so I’m putting it on a back burner.
More good news, my short story Earning My Stripes was published by Pulp Asylum Magazine!
The Idea
This is one of my favorite stories I’ve written, but it didn’t get picked up by the 20+ magazines I submitted it to.
I was listening to a country music playlist while building a fence when I came up with the story. My oldest daughter was helping and somewhere between ‘Mama’s Broken Heart’ and ‘Gunpowder and Lead’, I came up with a story about a southern girl burying a dead body.
The original version was literally a how-to about digging a hole. Paragraphs would alternate between a sweet father-daughter moment of her childhood and the girl as an adult burying a body.
The final product ended up having a very unique voice, which is why I don’t think it fit in at any magazine I submitted it to.
My theory is it’s because I’m a dude in Delaware writing from the POV of a woman with a thick southern accent. In my defense, I grew up in Texas and this was modeled off of Miranda Lambert. So it’s a girl in the Arizona desert written buy a Texan man in Delaware using a Texas-born country singer as inspiration.
It’s probably not great, but it’s unique and I like it.
How to Dig a Hole
By Tom Ramey
Daddy taught me how to swing a bat and dig a hole. He didn’t get around to much else, because a trucker thought popping a couple gas station pills was better than stopping for the night. I was twelve when that happened, just starting to grow into myself, awkward and unsure.
It was hard not to think about that as I drove through the night to get to my family’s old ranch. Somewhere between Los Angeles and Phoenix my mind went to auto pilot, the lines on the road blurring into the night. The first light crept over the horizon as I turned down the familiar gravel road, each bump and dip rattling through my tired bones as I made my way to the back of the pasture. I hadn’t been here in about four years.
My boyfriend, well ex-boyfriend after last night, didn’t get along with my family. Every time I’d visit, we would fight, then the visits became less frequent until a few years had slipped by. It was the same reason I couldn’t remember the last time I saw any of my friends.
I wanted to be here because this was the last place I remember feeling safe. Before I had to start wearing long sleeves even in the summer, before I became a frequent flyer at my local urgent care, before I met him.
Once I found a good spot, I got to work immediately. It was important to start early, so I could be done before the Arizona heat sapped my energy. As my shovel hit the dirt, the metallic scrape against stone sent vibrations up my arms. The earth here was stubborn—hard-packed clay beneath a thin crust of dust that puffed up with each strike, coating my throat and nostrils with a mineral tang.
I thought back to the few memories I had of Daddy as my shoulders began to ache with the rhythm of dig, lift, toss. Dig, lift, toss.
When I was nine, he built a fence out front. I grabbed a spade from Mama’s garden and begged to help. He let me, even though I probably just slowed him down. I’d carve out the hole with my little spade, and he’d take over, deepening it with a post-hole digger until my arm couldn’t reach the bottom. We dug thirty holes that day.
Hours later, sitting on the porch with him, I asked why he didn’t just buy a fence. He said, “There’s pride in hard work.”
A realization clicked into place with the memory. The difference between me and my ex was that no one ever taught him the value of hard work.
He was the type to work twice as hard to avoid work rather than just doing what he was supposed to. Always some scheme, always ending fired, arrested, or both. And never his fault. If you even suggested he was wrong, he’d lash out. As I paused to wipe my brow, I felt the bruise that had formed on the side of my head, tender and throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
The hole grew deeper as the sun climbed higher. By mid-morning, my hands were raw despite the gloves I’d bought at a gas station along the way. Each shovelful became heavier than the last. The sides of the hole began to cast shadows, cooling the air around my legs while the sun beat down on my back and shoulders.
I had to stop every few minutes now, leaning on the shovel handle, watching buzzards circle lazily in the distance. They knew better than to be active in this heat. Smart creatures.
My t-shirt clung to my back, soaked through. The hole was almost deep enough, but I kept digging. Better too deep than too shallow. Things had a way of working themselves up to the surface out here. A fact I remembered from childhood, when our dog would occasionally bring back sun-bleached bones that the desert had decided to surrender.
It took hours of hard work to dig just one hole this time, but Daddy was right. When I was finished, standing at the edge and looking down into the darkness I’d carved from the earth, I did feel some pride.
Hard work was something he tried to ingrain in me, which is why he insisted I play sports. I picked softball because I thought it had the least amount of running. I was awful at first, but he was patient. Showed me how to swing the bat with my whole body, not just my arms. Eventually, I got good enough to play in college, not that he was around to see it.
College was a few years ago, and I haven’t held a bat since then. But last night it all came back as if I had never stopped playing. I didn’t even have to think about it, it was all muscle memory.
I stood there for a moment, letting the breeze cool the sweat on my face before returning to the car. The trunk popped open with a hollow sound. A trail of dried blood had formed a map-like pattern on the inside of the lid.
I took one last look at my ex and his dented head, half-wrapped in the blue tarp I’d bought yesterday afternoon. His eyes were still open, cloudy now, staring at nothing. Strange how someone so loud in life could be so quiet now.
I wrapped the body and bat together in the tarp, then dragged them down into the hole. The weight was considerable, but gravity helped, and soon there was just a blue bundle at the bottom of my morning’s work.
Standing over the filled hole under the setting sun, I patted down the last of the dirt with the back of the shovel. I’d scattered rocks and brush over the site, making it look like just another patch of Arizona nothing.
As I climbed back into my car, I glanced at the road that led back to the highway. There were decisions to be made now. Keep driving east maybe, somewhere no one knew my name or his. Start fresh in some anonymous town where questions about past relationships were answered with vague pleasantries. I had three thousand in cash, a half tank of gas, and no one was expecting me anywhere.
Or I could go back, report him missing, play the worried girlfriend. Could I pretend to be worried when all I really felt was relief?
The engine turned over on the first try. At least something was working in my favor. As I pulled away, I cast one final look in my rearview mirror at the patch of disturbed earth growing smaller in the distance. The desert would keep my secret. And in time, it would bury it deeper than even I could dig.
I had let him get away with too much for too long. He thought I’d never fight back.
He didn’t know my daddy taught me how to swing a bat and dig a hole. Daddy didn’t get around to much else, but thirty years later he was still looking out for me.
Hope your month is going well so far! Until next time, take care of yourself.