The Hole

A Short Story by Sarah Burt Howell

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Kevin came home from work to find June asleep in her sweatpants again, so he loosened his

tie and microwaved hot dogs and macaroni. Jeopardy wasn’t the same without her.

He woke because she was gone from bed. Cigarette smoke drew him to the window where he peered a long while into the darkness until he was certain he was seeing his wife, the nonsmoker, in the backyard there, beside a pulsing orange ember.

The next morning they sat on bistro-style stools while Kevin ate corn flakes and June stared

at the vacant yard.

He wanted a fountain as much as any husband, but he’d recently spent their “travel and

emergency” savings on a chef’s kitchen, complete with this bistro seating at the window.

The days of the brand-new kitchen had been glorious. June had dressed each morning in

skirts and sweaters. She’d made hazelnut coffeecake for breakfast. They’d eaten dinners of steak with roasted vegetables, meals that set things right in the world. They’d entertained friends with brie and sliced apples, sipping cabernet. When they watched Jeopardy, June had shouted answers loud and fast.

But after a while they stopped entertaining; she mentioned how the new appliances and big

copper sink highlighted the shabbiness of their living room. Out came her dark blue sweatpants, the uniform of unhappy days, smelling like casseroles from the neighbors and sinkfuls of dirty dishes. Now when he held June’s cool, soft hand in his own and asked what was wrong, she said it felt like she was falling. He knew about falling too.

They lived just four blocks from the cemetery — it reminded him of a well-trimmed park. He

thought June would feel better if she would only walk in this luxuriously expansive green space with him after dinner. It helped him to breathe the fresh air and stroll the quiet footpaths. He used to visit more often himself, sometimes twice daily, right after the accident.

When Penny died, it had seemed unthinkable to bury her alone, in a cemetery of strangers.

So they’d bought three plots and three matching headstones, and placed their daughter in the middle.

Each of their granite headstones spelled out their full names. Below their names were their

birthdates, followed by a dash. Only Penny’s had the death date filled in.

Back when Kevin visited the cemetery each evening, he would read Penny’s bedtime stories

to her: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, and even Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom,

which he couldn’t stand; but he read it with the rest because it was her favorite.

Then after a few years he wasn’t sure what books to read anymore, so he just came and sat on the smooth top of his own tombstone and stared wretchedly at hers. It calmed him to see his own and his wife’s names — “Kevin” and “June” carved into granite. But it troubled him to see “Penelope” on the headstone between them. Not just because she was dead, but because they’d only ever called her Penelope when she was in trouble. He worried that she might think that she’d done something wrong, that she might be thinking her parents were punishing her, because of the name they’d put on her grave.

Perhaps they were all being punished right now for his stupidity. He’d suggested this once to

June. She’d said, “The only thing you’re guilty of is being ordinary. It’s a tragedy that you look

like so many other men.” Her wistful expression when she’d him “ordinary” kept Kevin awake at night until he figured out how to swing a thirty-year home equity loan. He’d be 72 when he paid it off, but with interest rates at 3.2%, it was a decent investment.

They had been meaning to replace those drafty windows anyway. A new oak front door

suited them. They installed bamboo floors, brass wall sconces, and a TV that made Jeopardy

larger than life. All of which made the upstairs a sad world of its own.

Getting a second mortgage was surprisingly easy though, and it brightened their bedroom

considerably.

But that summer the neighbors planted exotic trees and built elaborate decks like on the

home make-over shows. That made the sun shine brighter on June’s broken lawn furniture and tangled ghost of a garden. She hid inside during the pleasant weather. She wore her sweatpants daily. Even the TV remote grew dusty.

Knowing how much June had once loved to draw, he bought her some watercolor pencils and suggested she design a new garden. Then Kevin tried not to think about the 10% penalty when he cashed in his 401(K). But after all that work on the house, it honestly made sense to spruce up the yard. And June had a real gift for landscaping illustration; he came home from work each night to find piles of clever designs.

They threw small dinner parties again during this garden planning phase. Friends and

neighbors toured the recent home renovations and admired June’s landscaping sketches.

Everyone complimented the fountain; the same pink fountain showed up in all of June’s

drawings.

When Kevin asked if they should build this fountain, June pooh-poohed the expense. She

said the fountain was something she liked to fiddle with, to cover up the empty space on the

lawn.

When Penny had been running around out back, that particular spot was filled with her

yellow plastic swing set and a bright red slide. The play structure at Penny’s preschool had been a shockingly elaborate pirate ship, but she’d often told Kevin she preferred her swing set at home because it belonged to her.

She said he belonged to her too, which made him feel both special and guilty way. It was the

same when she’d relentlessly pestered him to chaperone the field trip to the art museum. When Penny first started preschool, Kevin and June took turns chaperoning field trips; but then Kevin signed up for every trip after Penny said she liked it better when he came along. She said June paid too much attention to the other children. Kevin was unapologetically there for Penny; he sat next to her on the bus, he held her hand on the sidewalk. He kept her safe.

However, Penny’s preschool teacher had suggested that Kevin let some of the other parents

chaperone their trip to the art museum. Penny cried for hours when he told her she’d have to visit the museum without him.

On an overcast Thursday afternoon, two classrooms of Penny’s preschool boarded a city bus

and rode downtown. The children had disembarked from the bus and were walking buddy-style towards the art museum when Penny recognized Kevin’s office building from across the street. She’d sat many times at his window with her crayons, drawing pictures of this same busy street on Saturday afternoons while her father wrote legal briefs and her mother worked-out in the company gym.

Penny jumped up and down as she pointed out her father’s office window to her classmates.

The teachers recalled later how impressed they were by her ability to identify it.

When the director of Penny’s preschool called him that day, she explained how Penny must

have seen someone who looked like Kevin on the opposite sidewalk, because she shouted,

“Daddy!” and let go of her walking buddy’s hand before she ran into the street during a moment of particularly heavy traffic.

June blamed the accident on the curse of his ordinariness, on the many thousands of men

who wore the same charcoal-colored down jacket.

Kevin ached to escape this curse by raising their lives out of the ordinary, if he could. By

installing a chef’s kitchen with a little bistro attached, by opting for the one-of-a-kind carved oak door, and by importing plants for their new garden.

Then he watched June wrestle with the vacant space still left in the yard. Penny’s swing set

had been hauled away from there years ago. But no matter how June rearranged their new lawn furniture and container plants, the vacant spot had grown brighter in its emptiness, until one night Kevin woke and peered out the window at his wife smoking cigarettes on the dark lawn.

June was not a smoker.

The next morning while Kevin ate his cereal, she stared out the window at this empty spot.

He slurped up the milk and then impulsively said, “If I get a bonus this Christmas, we should

build your fountain.”

Perhaps he’d misspoken, because when he returned home from work he was surprised to find three pallets of pink marble on the back lawn.

That evening, June stepped away from blanching asparagus to delicately look over his

shoulder while he reviewed the final drawings of their fountain.

“See how most of the structure is underground?” she said. “The best fountains have their

pumps buried.”

He could smell June’s shampoo as she bent over the plans. Her face looked vibrant and

familiar as she thumbed through the drawings, pausing to show him details. It was like visiting with an old friend.

She turned to another illustration. “See how the center of gravity is six feet underground?”

Soon after they’d lost Penny, he’d thought June’s hair color had changed from blond to dark

brown out of grief, like how his hair had gone prematurely grey. When he finally understood that June’s hair looked different because she’d stopped coloring it or brushing the kinks out of it, he still thought grief had changed both their hair colors. Right now, hers was neatly brushed into a bun, and he was so glad to hear her humming as she went back to whisking the hollandaise, he decided to worry about money later. He would probably get that bonus.

The next morning, a flatbed truck rutted the backyard delivering a backhoe. He ate his omelet

while the men set the backhoe’s stabilizer legs. It was quite a production for a fountain.

Before he kissed June goodbye and left for the office, Kevin stepped onto the patio to meet

the contractor. The young man who strode over to greet him was about the same age as his

nieces and nephews. Penny had been their age too.

Kevin adjusted his collar against the spitting rain as they exchanged greetings, then he added, “One last thing. It would be great if you kept the ruts in the lawn to a minimum.” He pointed to his destroyed grass, a pair of muddy puddles the length of his lawn. “And before you dig, you’ll have to call the city to ask if there are buried electrical lines; it’s the law.”

The contractor saluted Kevin with confidence and vigor, or was it irony, as if to say everything was under control. But that afternoon at work Kevin got a text from June anyway. “Please come home ASAP. Digging accident.” Kevin shook his head as he gathered his coat and keys, worrying about what they could have hit, or who could be hurt.

He arrived home to find June and the contractor standing on the back patio, drinking coffee

in the drizzle. The contractor held a large black umbrella over June as they stared at the yard

with a new fascination.

It wasn’t an electrical line. Or plumbing. The neat oblong hole they’d outlined with florescent string had collapsed on its far end, a minor cave-in. June said it was the weather. The contractor pointed out that it had been raining for weeks; they’d hit a pocket of mud. The yard was situated atop a large mud bubble, and they’d punctured it.

“Never seen anything like it,” said the contractor. “Could have happened to anyone.”

The pity was that Penny’s climbing tree was leaning precariously toward the hole.

“We called you home because, I hate to say it, that maple tree’s got to come down now.” The

contractor shook his head. “It’s liable to fall and hurt somebody now.”

Kevin gave the okay to cut down Penny’s tree, surprised by how this broke his heart all over

Again.

That evening when he returned home from the cemetery, the tree was gone. Kevin walked out into the sawdust and mud and saw how the fountain’s hole had tripled in size, and now included the small chasm where the tree’s root ball had been extracted. A hard rain had been falling for hours, and currents of water merrily spilled along the tire ruts, carving out a widening gash as more and more of the yard’s rainwater emptied into this strange wound in his yard.

On Friday the extended forecast was for rain, and June had said the contractor couldn’t return to fill the hole until things dried out.

On Saturday, Kevin stood at a living room window as the widening gash in his yard caved in.

Pallets of pink marble slid into the hole and disappeared into the mud.

Early on Sunday morning, the neighbor’s tall wooden fence fell into the hole. It rested briefly

on the mud and then sank and vanished. Then the neighbor’s garage foundation got sucked in. A local news van came to shoot footage of the neighbor’s garage unthinkably collapsing and disappearing into the void.

On Monday, he was served papers. The neighbor was suing. Why was it his hole?

Monday night the rain eased, and the hole paused in its progress, possibly digesting.

Tuesday morning, it devoured the back alley.

His wife, modestly radiant with her hair in a paisley scarf, coordinated a rescue of the family

across the alley. Air mattresses, children, and boxes of treasured possessions arrived on his living room floor. Flood lamps and video cameras, too.

Tuesday night, the neighbors from across the alley sat in mismatched pajamas on the bistro

seats by the window and watched his hole devour their home.

His wife perched on the arm of his chair while the neighbors ate brie and apple slices,

shaking their heads in grief as they listened to the sounds of their home’s creaking timbers and cracking, breaking beams.

Kevin leaned into June, and she kissed the top of his head protectively. He didn’t want to be

associated with this hole anymore.

The city got involved on Wednesday when his hole swallowed the sidewalk and street

beyond the alley. They invoiced him for both.

On Thursday the hole gained momentum, taking down a short row of condos before

consuming a mini-mall.

During the weekend it ate some more houses and a tiny Chinese restaurant, along with the

neighborhood coffee shop.

All that weekend his wife answered the constantly ringing phone with patience as she cooked

vast, family-style meals of French toast or sloppy Joes. She fed the neighborhood, the media, the curious.

He gave her the last cash from his wallet on Saturday. 

By Monday morning, the refrigerator was empty and the neighbors left for a hotel soon after.

The local papers called to ask, “Why is your house standing? Why do you think you’ve been

Spared?” 

He admitted that he just didn’t know. It had all seemed so solid underfoot for a while.

Late Monday night he woke with his wife sleeping peacefully beside him. They were alone in the house now. He sat up in bed and looked out the window. He could see the far edges of the hole awash in the glow of distant flood lamps. The hole was starting to devour the cemetery now.

As the benches, the trees, the peaceful paths and various tombstones slid into the muddy chasm, he felt a small relief. Penny had been buried near this end of the cemetery, and her headstone was surely gone by now. He thought again what a mistake it had been to spell out her full name in granite, and was glad that she’d no longer have reason to feel she was being punished. She’d done nothing wrong, and neither had he. It was not a crime to be ordinary. Any ordinary man would have been looking out his office window, hoping to see the children arrive at the bus stop.

Any father would have grabbed his jacket and run down to the sidewalk to watch his daughter

from across the street while she walked toward the art museum.

He nestled back into bed, against June’s warm back. He had wanted, as much as any husband, to tell his wife the truth about what happened. But from the way the car hit Penny, he’d known their life was over. He’d run back inside and locked his office door. He’d sat on the floor and cried in disbelief, listening to the approaching sirens, waiting for the phone to ring.

Now when he listened to a distant siren in the night, he was right back on his office floor, the

hole, the inconceivable chasm, newly arrived in his heart. Finally, thankfully, the timbers

beneath him creaked and shattered. He knew that sound from listening to the neighbors’ houses collapse. He gratefully held onto his sleeping wife and closed his eyes as he waited for them to finish falling.

The End

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(c) 2013 - 2025 Sarah Burt Howell

Author's note: I wrote The Hole in 2012, while at the Whidby Island MFA program. I’m sharing it to be read freely online because I feel it's important readers can encounter my work directly, without paywalls, platforms, or magazines to purchase. You can also read Soul Mountain.