At the edge of the grave Mara peered in. "Too deep," she said. "Too deep."
Moisture had collected the length of the dirt of the grave down. Worms from miles away knew about this deep grave and were coming.
Chocolate cake was Emiline's favorite; good chocolate cake: chocolate cake which bordered on pudding in its moistness. An icing which neither boasted nor distracted from the molecules beneath it - this was her cake.
Emiline neither knew nor cared about the funeral. Her heart had been startled by different affairs that night. Wind and rain had surely penetrated her feelings of safety. Water had trespassed, had snuck beneath the coatings of light blue paint of her shutters. How had she come to be baking loaves of peanut butter this night?
Bennett was in the basement sleeping - the thrashings of his dreams looming in the dark room above him: spatulas of chocolate, dogs, and Sheila mixed like the kneadings of dessert breads being made in the kitchen above.
Emiline wielded the metallic blades of her small white mixer.
Why had the grave been dug so deep? As if a perfect machine had extracted a slice of the earth so clean that ants were envious. It was not so deep that a cross section of the entire sphere of the earth at that place would have disclosed it or that looking down it one could not see its bottom or whether it was contained. A pure white light shone up a few dozen feet at the nethermost tip of this fine geometried hole; a pure white light.
Bennett was summoned and awakened. A perfect ding had sounded and a perfect cake in Bennett's eyes was lifted steaming from a tight experienced porcelain oven. Carving cross sections, the baby was lifted to its high chair next to the occasionally rattling window. Thomas, the two year old entered, rubbing his eye with a gentle fist. Dings had sounded in all their hearts. Red-eared aproned Emiline kissed them all with her mind.
It was as if the rain could not reach the extremity of the deep hole and it did not. It was even as if something happened between the knees of the girl named Mara at the border of the edge of the hole and the body of the space in the hole that marked not a rest but an immunity to the thrashings of the storm that even the worms in the ground (especially) knew of.
And the trees knew.
Murder does not factor into our story. Murder does not factor into our death. Unless the chocolate cake be murdered. Unless the dirt that Emiline trodded upon during her preparations to cook be part of the wrinkling of the boundaries of things that signals a murder.
