Neither Credible nor Reliable

They buried the body in the backyard, but that’s okay, because she—this twenty-year-old girl—had gone into the backyard alive and willing with one of the men, and she didn’t leave when the other four with shovels showed up. 
          So really, it’s okay. There was a fence, sure, but she could have hopped it. And there was a gate, sure, but she could have opened it. So what if two of the men stood by the only exit? They weren’t blocking it; they just stood there. With shovels.
          If anything, the girl welcomed the burial. She smiled at the men, laughed with the men, understood her role and said, “Hey, what you gonna use those shovels for anyway?” because what else was there to do? Nothing about the backyard had felt real once the others showed up. It felt fake, like she was suddenly put into some play without her knowledge. And so she clung to that, her lines, her cues, anything to hide the way her eyes kept straying down to the points of their spades. She let her mind drift as the men began to dig, let it drift high and unconnected. It floated to the back corner of the fence and stayed there, out of reach.
          The men had their fun. They plunged right there into the deep wet earth and plowed and plowed and some continued while the others took breaks, and then they switched, and then they laughed with each other and compared notes and suggested the best way to stab down into the earth—try this, try that—and then they all joined in together again until the grave was hollow, hollow, and where was the girl? Oh yes, she was in the back corner of the fence—oh no, no, she was in the grave so she was probably dead by now, right? Yes, that was her role, that was her next mark. Everything was okay because she got in the grave nice and easy once it was done. She went down so fine. There was nowhere else to go.
          The girl was in the grave and the men leaned on their shovels and sweat beaded the backs of their necks, and over their brows, and between their thighs. “Wasn’t that fun?” they asked, but the girl was dead, she was down there below in the grave. The men fidgeted, one dropped a shovel, and so they said, louder this time, “Hey! You had fun.”
          “Yes, I had fun,” said the corpse from the grave because she was there, pieces of her always would be, so even though she couldn’t feel her hands, or her bones, and her vision had tilted, smashed and stretched so that the men looked like they towered six feet above her—because they did, they did—she said, “I totally wanted to do that. That was fun.”
          One of the men made a waving motion with the hand not on his shovel. The corpse amended: “I’m having fun. I want to do this.”
          Another hand wave, another shovel dropped, replaced by a glare of light, a watchful, recording eye. 
          “I consent,” said the corpse.
          The men looked pleased—they were always pleased when their shovels had fresh soil on them—so they nodded to each other and slapped each other on the back and relished in the fact that they were talented and young and athletic and the whole country loved them, didn’t you know. 
          The girl didn’t flinch when the first scoopful of earth rained down on her face.

There’s still a body in the grave. 
          Now, even after the men have gone. 
          She’s still a corpse, but slowly, that unconnected mind that had been hiding in the corner of the backyard starts to drift down a little, and it finds itself—its bones and cartilage and the nerves that are slowly regaining feeling. The girl is buried in the grave, but that’s okay, because she realizes this now and she doesn’t like it, the grave is too dark and too cloying, so she digs and thrashes and pushes up, up, up against the earth, until there is sky again, and she laughs, chokes, tries to clear the soil that’s clogged in her lungs, her mouth, her cunt, and there, to the left of where she collapses, is a shovel. The men forgot one. They were too busy having fun, because that is what they can do.
          The not-quite-a-corpse no longer in the grave, says, “Hey. I think they murdered me. Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did.”
          But no one is around to hear so she takes her corpse and pops her joints back where they’re supposed to go and she screws her head on right and wraps her ghostly self around the meat of it all so, so tightly so that when she walks out of that backyard, she does so steadily, not even needing the fence to balance. That, it turns out, will be a mistake, because later it will be used against her, and people will say no, no way someone can walk so confidently, so sure, if they had just been murdered. 
          “Hey,” the girl says. “I think they murdered me.”
          She says it to a friend first and she gets a hug so tight and constricting that she thinks maybe she’s back beneath the earth, but then the friend lets go and tells her how she was murdered too, once. 
          “I’m pretty sure they murdered me,” she says to a police officer, and he’s sympathetic, sure, but he also comes back later and says he can’t find the murder weapon—only shovels, and a person that sounds not quite like herself saying, I consent. 
          “Yeah,” she says later, to a judge, because despite the clueless police officer her voice has carried a bit, mostly because of the men, and the country that loves them, and the persistence of the dirt that’s still stuck behind her ears. “I feel that they—I think that they—murdered me.”
          The girl is twenty-seven now. She’s a woman now—in the odd sense that the men are also now boys, good, hard-working boys with their whole lives ahead of them—but still, the burial is never easy to recount aloud. Most of her mind has come back now, has slowly but surely floated down from that corner in the backyard, and has remembered how the men raised their shovels high, their blades flashing against the glare of the moon, falling quick and sure towards—oh God. Oh God, they murdered her. She remembers the grave. She can still feel it, all that earth, the wetness of it, the way it squelched between her fingers and toes, even as she clawed and kicked against its weight. And it was heavy, so heavy. Her ribs, grinding together, crushed between the rocks and sediment and press of her own organs, the ache in her pelvis and her throat and the way the tendons of her calves had gone so tight it was like the muscle wanted to jump straight from the bone. She didn’t want the grave. Who would want the grave? There’d been soil in her mouth, choked down and down and down until mushrooms sprouted from her lungs and worms wiggled in the tissue of her stomach and there were maggots, thousands of them, swimming in her veins, eating and eating, until she was nothing but a collection of nerves—shaking, raw. 
          Didn’t people know how hard it was to dig out of there? How hard it was to find the meaty flesh of her tongue against all that muck, let alone remember how to use it?
          But now, the judge is looking at her. The judge sits so high up above everyone else—six feet high—as she says, with the gavel between her fingers, “not guilty,” to the rest of the world, because the judge finds the woman—this girl, this corpse, this ghost—to be, “neither credible nor reliable,” as though there is not still gravel in the back of her throat.

She crawls back to the grave. 
          There’s nowhere else to go.
          The earth still eats at her, but it is a familiar pain. A common weight. Resting there she can hear the others, the graves to the east and west, north and south. Bones upon bones. Some of the other corpses get up every now and then. They crawl and dig and dust themselves off, go to work, pay their bills, drive their children to school, but, at one point or another, they always come back. 
          The girl hadn’t heard them at first, the night it happened, but she hears them now. 
          “It’s alright,” some of them say. “Maybe the next one will have more luck.”
          Others just wail.
          There are too many, the girl in the grave thinks, as the worms wiggle, and the maggots munch, and her mind floats up and away again. 
There are too many graves in this country, to expect anything else to grow.

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