"Pretty Girls Make Graves"
Stories from Dig Me Out
Dig Me Out, published in 2021, is no longer available in print. But you can get the stories here!
This is “Pretty Girls Make Graves.”
HER
"Rosie."
In a message of static, the name was clear.
"Rosie."
Forty nine seconds the message ran on my cell. From an unknown number with a distant area code. When I first played it, on the way to the small cabin off Route 84, I was only half-listening.
"Rosie."
By the third listen, I knew the speaker was male. He used a name I'd abandoned. He repeated the name five times.
"Rosie."
The static, the caller, both sounded so distant. Like they came from one of those suitcase cell phones from ‘80s movies. Back in time and far across the country. As I drove the mountain roads, listened to The Smiths and other music from before I was born, the message was the words of a stranger, for a stranger.
And then I was at my new home and there were things to do. So I forgot about the message. I lost myself in schedule and task, like a true soldier.
That first day, I picked up food and gas and duct tape from the bait-and-tackle shop down the mountain. I weeded and pruned the wild thicket of grass and bush that bordered the front path, cut back the vines that hid the front door, filled the bird feeders. I swept the bare wooden floors, dusted the cobwebbed ceiling and wood-paneled walls, wiped down the kitchen sink and tub. I oiled my rifle, stripped and reassembled it, then did it again, only slightly slower than my best time in basic training.
Done with the house, I cleaned myself with a damp towel, under my armpits, between my legs, behind my knees, where the sweat had pooled and become salt. I poured cold water over my hair, then cut it off, close to the scalp, in big black chunks that fell to the floor like fur. Then I sank deep into the cracked leather recliner, a cloud of dust rising as I fell, and put a hand on my belly.
I wanted a girl. That seemed selfish, knowing what she and I would face. Knowing it'd be easier to be a boy. But all the same, I pictured a little girl with knobby knees, braids, missing front teeth. We'd plant a garden for flowers and vegetables, get some sheep and goats, live by our own work and in our own world.
My daughter would need a name. I still had a few months to decide. But of all the things that were frightening to me about those months of preparation, and the act of pushing her out safely, and the months after, doing all I could to keep her alive, naming was terrifying. Naming a thing confers power; giving her a name could give her strength, or take it away.
Holding her, in the quiet cabin and the decaying chair, I thought of the message again.
"Rosie."
He sounded lost, lonely. A garbled distress signal, sent to a woman long turned ghost. I pitied him.
HIM
Her voice asked him to leave a message. The sound of her nearly drew blood. It sliced, a garrote to the gut. When it was his turn to speak, he lost all language. All the words, all the names for things, disappeared. Except hers. He said that name, again and again, and by saying it, he said he was coming. He told her to hang on.
HER
I dug trenches. Around the perimeter, where the wild grass gave way to trees and gravel, I dug steep drops. I went slow and easy, slipping the shovel into dirt wet from the previous night's thunderstorm, letting her move within me, giving her room to breathe as I did.
I talked to her as we worked.
"A good trench is a lost art," I told her. "We don't create lines like we used to."
When I'd talked to the cabin owner on the phone, an old woman who'd advertised on Craigslist and asked for pennies, she'd said the cabin was pre-war. I asked which war. She laughed.
"At least in the First World War," I told my daughter as we dug, "you knew which side was which. Even if they were only separated by a few yards. West trenches, the good guys. East trenches, the bad. In the middle, no-man's land."
I thought of maps, systems of deep lines rutting across a continent. Like arteries, veins, things that bled deep red and smelled of rust.
A few feet down, I jumped in the hole.
"A little bit more," I told her. "Enough to crouch and give line of sight, while still protecting. Since it's just us, it doesn't have to be much wider than this."
My hands shook, and an angry red line of welts and blisters budded on my palm. Behind us, a football field away, the sun was setting behind the cabin.
Down the mountain, I heard the sound of a motor. We went to my knees in the trench, counting the seconds. One hundred and fifty one passed before a crap Hyundai with a wheezing exhaust pipe cleared. Another eighty-six before the motor faded down the other side.
"It's tight," I told her. "But it's good notice."
HIM
Everyone told him she liked cities. She'd mentioned St. Louis, Chicago, San Diego, they said. Places full of people and far from their town, which was twenty minutes from Akron. But he remembered that night, how she'd stared at the Ansel Adams on his living room wall, the one with snowy peaks, a river shaped like a snake, storm clouds above all. He'd asked if she'd been to Wyoming, and she'd shaken her head like it was heavy, like it hurt.
He'd asked questions. He wanted her to feel his attention, his effort. See that he was worth her own.
But she'd brushed them aside. Taken off her shirt, pants, bra, underwear, before he could swallow his swig of Stella.
She stood naked, her brown skin straining over thin bones, her long black hair a veil, and stared at those mountains. Even when he'd kissed her, tasted her, slid himself inside her, called her baby, she looked away, into that black and white world.
HER
At night I took to sitting on the grass beyond the front door. No lights in the cabin, or outside. Ants crawled on my legs. Lightning bugs brushed my cheek. Owls and bats screeched in the night wind. The light of other worlds beyond this one shone above.
Sometimes I’d put on some music, cue up my favorite song. Sometimes, I’d listen to the sounds of wild things.
"This is peace," I told her. It felt good to name the feeling.
She turned, kicked. She'd started moving more within, and I thought of alien films, the creature lurking under skin, ready to burst in a shower of blood. I thought of shrapnel, alien bodies slicing from the other side to get in.
"We can't help it," I said as I spread my hands in the grass behind me. "Being around other people. We can't help fighting for what's ours."
My first week over there. My first trip anywhere, to a country I’d never wanted to visit. In the dry cool of a desert night, the girl in my platoon. The skin over her liver and pancreas a useless flap of red, her right cheek gone, gums and bloody teeth shown to the world. Her left foot hung from a shred of tissue that looked like the chicken drumsticks they fed us. And my pathetic kit: IVs, needles, cloth, tubes, shears, clear liquids. Tonics and potions. My own gun at the ready.
My girl kicked again.
"What's your name?" I wondered if there was a name that would give protection as well as power. Could I brand her, so all could see she was not to be touched? What language would that be?
I pictured her, afloat in her placenta, speaking her own aquatic language. An amniotic language, based in my body’s heartbeat and rushing blood and rolling bile.
When I first got back from Iraq, I did what I was supposed to. I got a job at the pizza place in the main square. I took a couple classes at the community college in the next town. One of my teachers talked about dialects and languages, how English and Arabic and Spanish, all the world’s languages, derived from the same language. Over time, people moved away from their roots, developed new words, created wholly different languages to separate us from each other.
I wondered, looking at our cabin, at the dark, at my trenches, if all those different languages came from mothers, searching for the right sounds that would mark their children as safe.
HIM
For months, he tried to figure it out. Why did she run? When he had love to give?
From his corner stool in the bar he’d seen her walk in, alone. Darkness in her hair and skin, but also under the hoods of her eyes, streaming behind her like jet contrails. Most guys wanted brightness. The cool girl, up for whatever. She wasn’t like that, he could tell.
He thought of her naked beneath him, her skin dark against his gray linen sheets. There hadn't been many women. He wondered sometimes if she was even real, if he’d dreamt her. It was only one night, after all.
But he wouldn't have dreamt all the angry red marks on her forearms or how her pores smelled like grain alcohol. He wouldn't have dreamt her slack cheeks and lips when she looked at the ceiling, at the armoire, how quickly she flipped over so he couldn’t see that slackness. He wouldn’t have dreamt how dry she was inside, like a desert, how she insisted he push ahead anyway. He wouldn’t have dreamt that she’d leave so quick, ignore his texts.
When he found out where she’d been, it all made sense to him. She was wounded. She needed him. He'd been waiting for someone to need him.
HER
I finally played the message again. It was a code to break.
We drove down the mountain one day, toward the river. The road scribbled Zs back and forth across the hill. "Code used to be something much different," I told my daughter. “Now it's all computers. You'll probably learn it by the time you're a toddler. But back then, it was math. All done in the brain."
I’d watched a movie about Alan Turing when I got back from Iraq. He and his mathematicians and spies, British code breakers all, cracked the German command. But then, they let Allied ships and German Jews die to preserve their secret and win the war.
After an hour of slowing and accelerating, curving and straightaways, without seeing another car, we reached an empty bank at a thin stretch of the river. I patted myself, checking gun on hip, knife in bag, baby in belly.
Outside the water rushed past and the air felt thicker, heavier.
"Rosie," the voice said. Surprise and excitement.
The static could have been harmless background noise, the chatter of a shopping mall, the echo of an interstate, the tumult of zoo animals. It could have been a connection over frayed wires and an aging landline. Or it could have been a message, its emptiness full of meaning.
"Rosie." Confused. "Rosie." Anger. "Rosie." A call for shame, guilt. "Rosie." Resolve.
I listened to it again, the volume as high as it would go. The speaker didn't sound like family. The static didn't sound like this, like the mountains and wilderness.
Later, after he won the war for them, the Brits jailed and castrated Turing for loving men.
In Iraq, slicing through camouflage to repair gashes and gunshots, pushing aside the boy or girl’s artillery that had failed to protect them. Each person reduced to a code, something to crack in order to fix them. Every decision I made led to death or saved a life. Things made sense.
Back home, in the bathroom of the pizza place, when I took my test and it came back positive, things made sense again, for the first time since I'd come home. I knew what to do.
I threw the phone into the river, underhand, so it skipped across the surface once before sinking.
"That's not my name," I told my daughter. "I don't think it ever was."
HIM
He talked to regretful people every day. In order to get their insurance payout, they had to go through him. He inspected their cars for damage, drank coffee in their kitchens, watched their cigarettes shake as they described near-fatal side-swipes and roll-overs. They questioned their decisions, those they made consciously and those their body made by rote. For awhile they would feel unsafe, jumpy, unable to make decisions. He filed his reports back in his cubicle, and they received their money, and they would feel better, and he would feel fulfilled.
After meeting her, he wished he talked to more liars. That was the domain of the freelance private investigators working for his firm. They sought out fake addresses, sorted through pain pills, interviewed exes and conspirators.
He knew a PI, a stocky Swede who he'd dealt with on a past claim. He asked the PI for a few reports, a bit of legwork, suggested it was a current case. Not fully a lie, not fully the truth.
The PI found her numbers, and the region of Wyoming she’d run off to. Specific roads to roam. Learned where she'd been, who she'd been. The PI said it wasn't a surprise, her leaving. Vets, especially medics, have their decisions made for them over there, meals, clothes, schedule. All they decide is moment to moment: how to save themselves and others in the midst of combat. Returning to normal life, choosing a fabric softener, a sandwich, a jacket for the cold, becomes incomprehensible.
He leaned on that pain. That trauma. That's why she ran away. Without her wounds, she would have seen him fully, seen what he offered the first time. Maybe they could laugh about it later, how full of regret they might have been at never getting together. Their near-miss.
That's what kept him going, through the months of unpaid leave that threatened to turn into unemployment, through the false stops and starts of his clumsy investigation, through the long hours in the ailing Hyundai that wheezed and coughed its way through the Wyoming mountains.
HER
"Rosie."
I heard his voice in my head long after I threw the phone out. Lying in the musty twin bed with daffodil sheets, the mums comforter thrown back. My daughter was taking up more space, making her presence known, and it made me hot and cranky.
"Rosie."
Not family. No trace of Mexico in the vowels, the R. I was the first and only one born here. My mother used to shake her head at my American accent, the blasphemy of contracting syllables, letters that only sounded like themselves, all in the nasally twang of rural Ohio.
With one hand I felt for the shotgun, laid out next to me like a pig-nosed scarecrow. The other I curled over her.
Her name. It had to be shield, but it also had to be code.
"They tell you you,” I said to her, “that you can be anything.” My hand moved across the expanse like a vacuum. "There's so much potential, and the only thing holding you back is you. It's a lie. You'll be a woman, you'll be brown. Poor. So they'll try to send you off to a war, to help you reach that potential."
I thought of my mother. She named me after a pretty, delicate piece of nature. It didn't protect me.
Did she survive my leaving? She knew what it was like to run. Without too many details, I’d heard her stories of leaving her town and country, and once here, leaving my father. She had believed the lie. She half expected my report cards filled with As and Bs to also come with stacks of cash. She shrank two inches when the reports, my good behavior, my clean ears and clean vagina didn't come with scholarships and the keys to all the cities. Her hair started falling out in clumps when I told her I enlisted. While I was gone she got lost at grocery stores, found herself driving with no memory of where. When I got back, and she found my bed empty again and again, found me harder, absent, unfamiliar. If you’re not better than me, she’d said, what was it all for?
"I'll try not to live through you," I said to my stomach. "I can't promise I won't live for you."
Out here, maybe the rules would be different. Maybe we could truly be who we were meant to be.
HIM
He drove the same roads, the same Zs, up and down. He waited for the laws of attraction to guide him. He was losing his hold on the things that used to guide him: facts and figures, reality and truisms. He was losing his hold on her dark eyes and smooth shoulders.
Driving, foot on the brake of the downward slide, foot to the gas on the climb.
He was wondering if this had been a mistake, if she was too far gone to be saved.
He was veering into doubt, unsure if she was worthy.
He was worried he’d imagined a future that wasn’t there.
He was scared he wasn’t the man he thought he was.
And while he was drifting and worrying, on a partly cloudy morning with the chill of fall descending, on a steep grade, his motor chugging and something else ticking, he saw a flash of white as it fell into and under the ground.
He pumped the brakes and eased onto a gravel path he'd missed before. He scanned the grounds, saw a tiny cabin tucked far back from the road, and a deep line of ditch between them.
HER
It took me longer than it should have to recognize the sound of the motor. I held my daughter and my rifle as I raced across the field and jumped into my trench.
Too late, though. The motor cut. The car door creaked. The boots crunched.
No one knew I was here except the landlady. She said she'd never visit, leaving me to my business. But maybe she changed her mind. Maybe it was a nobody with a flat tire. Maybe it was something else I hadn't accounted for.
"No trespassing." My head still below the dirt line.
The crunch of gravel stopped for a moment. The wild world was silent, as if even the birds and insects sensed the invasion.
"I have live ammo," I said. Louder than the last warning.
"Rosie?" The gravel again, ground under someone’s shoes.
I stood, my torso above the trench, and aimed the shotgun.
HIM
She had an impossibly long gun. Her hair was chopped, leaving uneven patches of white scalp. Her breasts hung loose and low under a white t-shirt. But it was her.
He'd imagined how it would feel when she finally saw him. He'd imagined it, here in the wild, as the secret relief of being found, a smile that would slowly win out over shock or fear.
She saw him now. Really saw him. And being seen was terrifying.
HER
"Who are you?"
"Rosie," he said. The man was early 30s, white, with ash-blonde hair. He had the advantage of height, six feet to my five-and-a-half, but beyond that he was thin and lanky. Not much to him.
"Who are you?" I said it a little louder this time.
"Rosie," he said. "It's me." He pointed to himself, in the direction of his chest. Like his whole self was tied up in his heart. The gravel announced his next step. He should have pointed to his throat, his voice, the one from the message.
"Who are you?"
"Rosie please, it's me."
"Stop," I said. My weapon was well-oiled, well-kept.
His face seemed to seize, his lips and jaw and eyes working through too many emotions to settle on one. "Don't you remember? It's Paul. From that night?"
A liar gives too many details, confidently. He was vague, rattled. "Whoever you're looking for, she's not here."
"You look different," he said, gesturing to my hair. "But I'd know you anywhere, Rosie."
"That's not my name."
"It's the name you gave me," he said.
I looked him over again. Flattened nose, thin lips. Long earlobes. Rough patches on his arms near the wrist, maybe psoriasis.
There'd been so many, in those first months home. My fingers, instead of tying off veins, inserting IVs, handling weapons, were arranging cheese and ham slices on pizza crusts. My feet, instead of sprinting across hard-packed dirt and aged stone, sat still under a school desk. My back, instead of carrying half my weight in gear, guns, supplies, spasmed at night from the weight of nothing. My body was purposeless, foreign. I thought someone else could make me feel it again. I’d go into bars already drunk on cheap vodka, pick someone with thick arms or thighs, a tight ass. Sometimes they just needed to meet my eyes and not falter under naked need. I left each of them before the sun came up, before they could try again.
A vague memory of his shape, moving between me and a black and white image of mountains.
"If we had a night," I said. "That was it. Go home." My voice was not gentle. I had my gun.
HIM
It was all going wrong.
"No," he said, shaking his head. Throat closing around tears. "Not without you! I came to help you. Bring you back. Or go somewhere else.”
She wasn't putting the gun down. She wasn't melting in relief. She wasn't telling the truth.
If he could just hold her hand, look into her eyes. Skip the words. She was looking at him now, really looking. She would see the two of them, as he did.
Gravel squeaked as his boots left the path for the grass.
"Stop," she said again.
He was close enough now to see more of the ditch in which she stood. It was freshly dug, without grass cover.
"What are you doing, Rosie?"
"I'm telling you to leave, and never come back."
HER
The man looked so hopeful. He'd found me, when I'd worked hard not to be found. Under that white skin with angry red patches, the smile he was working hard to keep, the blonde hair that stood on end in the wind, revealing a bald patch, something desperate thrummed.
But I was ready. I felt my spine straighten, my grip tighten.
When I learned about my daughter, I knew she could be from any of the men, all of them. Even this man in front of me. But she belonged to no one but me.
“One more time,” I said. “Leave now.”
HIM
"But," he said. From his place in the grass he could see more of her now. Her slashed hair, chunks of scalp, pert ears, long neck. Her feet were bare in the dirt. Her white t-shirt, wet under her arms and long, past her knees. Her shape, under the shirt.
He stared hard at that shape, matching it to his memory of her body, and finding something new.
All the reasons he'd considered for why she ran, all of them had been about hurt and fear. All of them fixable.
He hadn't considered this. Her shape, sudden and unmistakable. And as he worked through the math, added up her belly, her flight, their night together, did the sums and multiplied by new layers of shame, trauma, a mother's ferocity...
He smiled. Laughed. It was wonderful, this new discovery. Full of promise. Potential.
"Rosie," he said. He held his arms out wide.
When the blast hit his chest, he thought his heart had exploded from joy.
HER
The shot sent birds flying and rabbits running. All the creatures that had welcomed us, let us pretend to be wild, one of them, were now wary.
I held the gun up for another five minutes, watching the body, counting off the seconds.
When he didn't move, I leaned back against my trench wall. I gripped the dirt with my bare toes. I flexed and curled, flexed and curled. Breathed.
After more quiet seconds, that shape was still there, still immobile. I patted myself down, patted her.
"We'll move on," I said.
I felt her deliver a tiny kick under my belly button. Then her foot slid from my skin, back into her amniotic sea, where the sound of my heart and blood slowing lulled her to sleep.
"Lots of wilderness out here."
The rest of the afternoon and night I'd bury him in the trench and backfill the rest. Drive his car down the mountain and set it on fire. Pick up our things from the cabin and lock it tight. Start again.
I hummed to my baby as I got to work.
This story first appeared in Dig Me Out by Amy Lee Lillard, published 2021 by Atelier26 Books.