One day, the woman sensed she’d grown rotten; soon she wouldn’t be a person anymore. She wrote a note and left it folded on the kitchen counter. Behind the house, she dug a hole and laid herself in it. The note said to leave the house to somebody good; maybe the woman would be back when she was done being dirt—after the house had collapsed and decomposed and the good someone had whisked away to heaven—a very long time from now.

In the hole, the woman felt rotten, but she didn’t turn to mush. She dreamt of fruit. Of mold. Of shiny, cracking skin. She conjured a bleeding batch of raspberries, adorned in downy white tufts—the fermenting refuse she most longed to be.

Because the woman was too slow at being dirt, she got to thinking. The woman had often thought, throughout her life, about becoming a very big person—a person everybody could see from space. Over time, the woman learned a person that size would inevitably crush some very good folks, maybe even on purpose. The woman never wanted to harm anyone, but sometimes, even in smallness, she did. It frightened the woman how relentlessly she’d strived for largeness—and it seemed the harder she’d strived, the smaller she had become. After ages working to outgrow herself, the woman was roughly the size of a hole.

A hole in the dirt.

Dirt never hurt anyone. Out of dirt is where all the good stuff grows: the fruits that feed the goodest folks, the fruits that fall and make quick work of becoming nourishing dirt themselves.

The woman was only half-thinking now. Her hands began to wander the hole. One landed on a stone and fondled it. Its texture was smooth and grooved. A while later, the woman looked at the stone. The stone she very much admired. It was a fossil. Long ago, when the woman was a little kid, she had wanted to be a paleontologist, to uncover the newest oldest preciousnesses beneath the dirt. She had wanted to bring the dinosaurs alive in people’s lives.

In the hole, the woman began remembering. She remembered: somebody who wasn’t her had killed all the dinosaurs. The woman had been bad, sure, but she was not that bad. She had never been so big she could wipe out entire species—though she had tried, and not-tried, and in not-trying had been complicit in extinctions. Suddenly, the woman remembered: the one who killed the dinosaurs was dirt. First was the one big-dirt—which descended from the heavens and exploded, killing several dinosaurs—and then was the little-dirt the big-dirt made, a cloud of little-dirt so big it blocked out the only star around to make the fruits grow. Rattled, the life-giving dirt choked and starved its own offspring.

The woman in the hole in the dirt shivered. She didn’t want to be a meteor responsible for genociding the dinosaurs. She didn’t want to be the debris of another dirt’s tantrum. The woman did not want to be any kind of dirt that wanted everybody else to be dirt too. Most of all, the woman didn’t want to remember everybody was already dirt. She didn’t want to remember any of it—here, though, now, she finally accepted that she did. She did.

The woman who was dirt stood up from the hole in the dirt. She walked back to the house, where, happily, she sensed somebody good inside. The beloved was frying an egg. Although eons had passed in the hole, the yolk had not yet set. As the woman entered the kitchen, the beloved smiled. The two shared light touch, a kiss. Their little one rushed in loudly, scooping the split eggshell from beside the stove and careening out the door. Through the window, the lovers watched the little one lope across the lawn and lay the eggshell tenderly atop the compost pile. A neighbor friend joined the little one in rapt curiosity. The beloved’s sunny side sizzled and shone in the pan. Behind the lovers, on the far counter, the woman’s note lay folded in the lull between recycling, unread, or else gently replaced, the words received as poetry, verse addressed to sacred kin, contemplating with wonder how to gracefully transition into ancestry.