Hole in the Pocket

by Liz Fyne

He keeps a hole in his pocket. He takes it out when he needs it: round, flat. Floppy, glossy and smooth like a circle of black silicone, it’s stretchable to accommodate the body of the horse that fell through one night in the stable next door. He doesn’t understand why people keep horses. His neighbor was so clearly distraught—

He’s often wondered where they’ve gone to, all life’s “inconveniences” he’s put through the hole. He once tried putting his hand through it, just to test. Inside the hole felt very cold, inexplicably windy. When he’d retrieved his hand it had seemed normal enough, but he’d never done that again. The upshot, however, was that all the shit he’s put through the hole might come out again. So far that hasn’t happened.

He does pay attention, though, to how much he puts through the hole within a single week, like maybe it requires some time to process. Like if he’d left his hand in there longer, it might have emerged a meaty pulp.

His soon-to-be-ex-wife, she’d been the first one through. Invited to his house one moonless night to review the alimony agreement. The porch light was oddly burned out, and that last step up looked especially, impossibly “dark.” Dark like you’ve never seen. Like the font of all darkness, a world of it too greedy for just one world, it’s invading ours, too. Her foot falls through, and she looks surprised. The rest of her is ripped after, suddenly, yanked below as by an irresistible force. Then a zipping sound.

It’s the zip that makes him think most of the shit he’s put through will actually stay there.

He does pay attention, though, to how much he puts through the hole in a single week, like if it’s shit someone will miss. Because at some point someone might catch on. Somewhere. Maybe.

There’s a lot of shit that people do not miss, at least not anytime soon. By the time they’ve missed it, they might think they’d misplaced it because when was the last time they even noticed? Shit that no one else notices, but it drives you mad. Notepads with pages ripped crooked, abandoned coffee cups. It’s an abuse, that’s how he sees it, of a thing’s good purpose in life, of the proper acknowledgment of its untimely and undignified end.

Some things, though, some “people” are just plain annoying. Not so boorish as to deface the Post-It note, but noisy with their personal phone calls, swearing over the line. He doesn’t mind vulgarity “per se,” but not in the professional work environment. He puts his best foot forward here, and so should everyone else.

*

There is a monster in the hole, in the cold windy inside. And it’s tired of being in the hole. It’s been here so long, and it thinks maybe it can get a way out, a way through to another place where it’s not so dark and windswept. And sometimes the monster thinks it lives at the top of an inverted mountain so tall it pokes right through the boundary to the other world. It thinks it feels that other world sometimes. It thinks maybe it can grab at that hole at the boundary and hold on, where the peak peeks through. The very tip vanishes as through a sheen of black oil. Oily things sometimes poke through, just the smallest pieces of them, and this is the ticket, that’s what the monster thinks, the ticket out of here. To grab the things as they peek through the peak, the parts to assemble a whole new self constructed from, and compatible with, that other place: a skeleton of fully articulated discarded despicables.

It’s a monster on the other side, too, that’s what the monster thinks. Based on the woman part through the hole, the first person part, and her thoughts right then. About her former lover, that misnomer now she knows he can’t love anyone, final moments of slipstream consciousness before the monster zips her into place.

There is so much space in the hole that’s black and black and more black. Air like soot, opaque and velvety soft. More space than any monster might need for a growing collection of bite-marked donuts, dogs with wondering eyes, one huge equine mass stinking and hot and then sweat frozen in hard crystalline patterns. One final huff out.

A certain critical mass, that’s what the monster thinks, must be achieved to reverse the flow. Sufficient mass in the wrong world, then wrong-gravity. Inevitably the foreign material bursts through again, only requiring in the process an exchange—

*

He puts his best foot forward here, the man really does, or at least he tries, though he can’t see his foot. It’s fucking dark in here. It’s cold, too, but one good thing: All the shit he’s put through, it’s far far gone. He’d felt it coursing through him, bizarre amalgam sum of it, monstrously large yet somehow making him its conduit. A single, rolling wild horse eye had met his own at the moment of separation.

In fact there’s no shit here at all, at least not that he can tell. So when he puts his best foot forward, then it really is the best because it’s the only foot, and it’s amazing how good that feels.

There was no zipping sound in his case, so he does worry he might fall out again, but he’ll keep putting his best forward, and his best foot is pretty fucking good. No one else around anyway, and maybe this is how Heaven looks.