Burial Mounds
“Untitled Artwork 7” by Hiokit Lao
She held a half empty sunscreen bottle that made her think of smearing the white goo over her son’s cheeks, the way he backed up when he was a kid, his freckles buried under the lotion, her fingers desperate to rub it in. There were towels that smelled like summer, his faded name on the tag. She had written it, the letters in all caps, because he had never been great about keeping his things together.
In the adjacent room, her husband, half asleep but talking to her through the walls, listened to the history channel. An image of a burial mound panned the screen, the green earth humped like a pregnant belly. She tossed the broken goggles and rotting sparklers, and as she stood, the image changed showing within the mound, how the dirt separated each body into its own room.
“The pool closes this week,” she told her son who leaned in the pantry, his mouth full of cookies. “We should go tomorrow.” She knew they wouldn’t, but she liked the idea of sitting side by side in lounge chairs and watching the swimmers, the kids bobbing up and down in the shallow end, the orderly lanes in the deep end empty and waiting for someone.
He stood from the pantry, his hand now in a bag of chips. He had been small as a kid. His growth spurt took forever, but when it finally came in eighth grade, he sprouted above his friends who had taunted him. Now his college sweatshirt, a bright red, was too big, but he was always between sizes. In the student union he had pulled this one off the rack and they checked out and walked back onto the campus, the March wind blasting through their bones.
“Tomorrow?” he said. He was calculating everything he had to do. The dorm fridge. Packing. Seeing his girlfriend one last time (and another one last time).
Noticing his basketball shoes and his basketball shorts, she waved away the idea, letting him off the hook. “Heading out for a pickup game?” she asked. It was dark in the neighborhood, but the lights, bright and neon white, would illuminate the court. He’d played for the school too, and those games she had attended. He was clumsy but he had a way of calculating what the other bodies would do. Anticipating their next step or their next play.
By the time he left, her eyes felt like the bottom of the pool, the feeling of rough concrete under her feet, the way it could tear up a toe or a knee. She crept between the sheets, the thought of burial mounds returning. The images of bodies precisely stacked. Body, then dirt, then body again and so on. It was all she could think about, being under other bodies or being on top of other bodies.
She gave up on sleep but wasn’t sure what to do with herself. TV or toast? She turned to her son’s room. His packing had been more efficient than she realized. She poked into a half open box and saw layers of winter clothes and summer clothes, the way he had carefully placed fragile items between the soft cloth. She picked up things around his room that he had left behind. Cheap tchotkes, sure, but they were reminders of something. Was he packing anything sentimental? She put a snow globe onto a brown sweater.
In his closet she found dusty pictures and baseball caps from little league. She threw those in too. He had a collection of sports cards and Pokemon cards and LEGO people. Those went into another box. She lost track of time filling his half-packed boxes. She was beginning to construct a new box, one that would be completely sparse and open for everything else, when he walked into the room.
“Mom?”
She saw herself as he was seeing her, her legs splayed underneath her on the floor, her eyes strained and her hair bedraggled. She had on her pajamas which meant she wasn’t wearing a bra and only now this occurred to her. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He sat on his bed behind her. He tugged at the shoelaces — he was always so rough with the laces — and he kicked them from his feet. The smell of heat and sweat filled the room. “Those are disgusting,” she said.
“Why are you in here?” he asked, impatient like his father.
“I told you. Couldn’t sleep.” She watched his pained face consider the extra time it would take to undo what she had done.
“Will you and Dad get a divorce? When I move out?”
His questions didn’t startle her because of their content, the nature of it was evident in daily arguments, their gradual movement into separate rooms, but it did startle her to hear the questions from his mouth. Words she had asked herself over and over again; words that she and her husband had stopped asking.
“You should take the memories. The childhood memories.” She pointed at the boxes.
He stood and she cowered but he only moved toward the boxes. He pulled out a binder of baseball cards. He opened it and flipped through the clear, plastic pages. “I used to love baseball,” he said, “until that night — I was probably ten? — that you and Dad had that huge fight in the parking lot after the game. Had he been too drunk, or was it you that time?” He dropped the binder into the box. His voice was exhausted, not angry.
He looked unlike himself but only because she was seeing him as the adult he was becoming. She stood and attempted to find him at eye level, but she was much too short. He could pick up any item from the boxes and have a similar story. Would he do that to her?
“I don’t want that stuff,” he said and returned to bed.
That night after the game, on the car ride home, he had sat quietly in the back of the car — all of them were quiet in the car — and she refrained from turning to say something, to make the whole embarrassing scene feel more real than it already was. The next day, her husband at work, the two of them went to the pool. She hadn’t said sorry in the morning over breakfast, and she didn’t bring it up on the car ride. Really, she wasn’t sure if she should bring it up at all, but the fight had been loud, the two of them yelling, the insults callous and foul.
Her son had come out of the shallow end holding his goggles. The left side had broken and could she fix them, he asked, and while she struggled with the plastic pieces, she blurted it out. He took the goggles back from her, the wet of his hand on hers, and tried them on to see if she had gotten the fit right.
“It won’t happen again,” she said but she knew that wasn’t true, and he must have known that too because he simply shrugged, the little ball of his shoulder casually going up, and he retreated to the water. She watched him lower into the blue. His head visible as he tested the goggles, then he sank completely.
When she was back in bed, she didn’t think of bodies anymore but she thought of all those memories she had layered into his boxes. What she couldn’t grasp was the dirt. What was keeping everything in order? What was holding everything in place? What separated the layers of one thing to the next, and did it really matter if time and gravity was going to smash it all together in the end?
About the author
Katie Strine is a fiction writer from Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned an MA in English. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been supported by The Kenyon Review.
About the artist
Hiokit Lao is a 29-year-old self-taught artist from NYC. Through surreal, abstract, and vibrant pieces, she aims to create meaningful art that instills hope and positivity. Her art is a kaleidoscope of surrealism and abstract expression, a vibrant fusion echoing the various cultures that have shaped her worldview. Inspired by her diverse upbringing and a deep fascination with the world, her work resonates with the colors, traditions, and social causes around the globe. Each piece is a homage to cultural diversity, intertwining social narratives and her own artistic vision.