Beneath The Hole was yet another thrust fault. I could feel the surface with my fingertips. It was chock full of chards of pottery, seeds, biological matter and a secret technology I knew ‘I’ could never understand during my lifetime, even with a proper education. I recoiled and tried to speak, but my voice only cracked a notch. Was ‘I’ a witness or participant to this specialized propagation? My own genetic line of red ants was visible in my perpetually peeling palms.

In this subterranean place, exclamation marks were written upside down, and preceded sentences as well as followed them. I tightened my lips, made a fist and plunged deeper beneath the ground. My mother was an elephant holding the Snake of Garden Hose, splashing water all over my shoulders.

A cockroach climbed out of the hole and up my arm. Being a man (in theory), I tried not to make an issue of it. I fished around to get to the source, pulling up dead roots, corn stalk stumps and discarded bricks. In the soupy muck I felt writhing eels, or what I imagined eels to feel like as ‘I’ had never felt an eel before. Corn Tassel filled my head. She was an electric eel in the black body cavity.

I pulled out a used condom, and my mother’s first instinct was to blame me for littering. Little did she know I had never needed one.

“We hit the sewer line,” I said, trying to cover it up. There was the awkward moment of what to do with it. I slipped it back into the hole and pulled out some sort of shoe, or piece of tire, in its place.

“A huarache,” I said. “We are not the first ones who tried to fill this hole.”

“This is no ordinary shoe,” confessed my mother, fingering at the tread. “This was your father’s.”

“Which one?”

“Your second. The soles are made of what he used to call stealth rubber. They’re special shoes made for rock climbing. After he made it back from El Dedo de Dios alive I said to myself, “this is the last time.” I stole his shoes while he was sleeping and buried them here. I had no idea it would lead to all this.”