Sheila's Light
Since Sheila was a mole, she loved digging underground. She loved being underground because the dark made feeling more important than seeing. And frankly, as a mole, she could hardly see anyway. But now she wanted more from life. She wanted to know light. She wanted to see as those above ground see. She wanted to know where light goes each night, and from where it rises each morning.
Earlier in her life, after days rooting around, eating and keeping on, she’d tunnel to the surface, looking for light like it was the whole meaning of her life. It was so vague to her but so compelling. Light was a thing, she thought, you can see and feel. There at the end of the day was always the light of the setting sun, doing its turns from white yellow to banana yellow to tobacco orange to burning orange to faint fire red, each color streaking through the next. Eventually Sheila knew, absolutely knew, she needed to give the rest of her life to light, to pursue it all the way to where it settles at night. The problem was growing up as moles do, you’re taught to dig and eat, to love the darkness. That’s your whole life.
As she looked at the sun’s light each dusk before night, she noticed there was a line it went below when it lost itself. It made her sad and she wanted to find out why light somehow couldn’t stay. Light didn’t do what you asked it to do; it always found its own way and settled as it must. Or maybe, she thought, light was always there and you could only see it from where you were. Or maybe everyone saw light a little differently, which then led her to wonder what light and the color it begets could really be. Or maybe the dark was another kind of light. She didn’t know and couldn’t say. But what she did know was that it was time for her to finally go, to finally find out.
So one bright day Sheila jumped like a dolphin down in her hole. She knew the horizon line was west, so she set out with all the fury she could muster. For days she didn’t drink or eat or sleep. It was just forward digging, like she was a fuzzy drill bit plowing toward forever. She hurtled forward with a drive never seen in a mole before. Mile after mile, deep through the soily vastness, she was like a rocket in the outer space of earth below. And the earth was actually much deeper than she could have imagined. She carried on, moving through a dirt tunnel of her own spinning, rich and uniform until, that is, she really looked. When she really looked, she saw the granules of earth as changeable forms stuck to her, around her, poking her tiny eyes and coating her body. It was as if the earth was saying she belonged to it, and this voyage to light, this voyage to the horizon where light fled, wasn’t relevant to her life. It seemed to say to her that only earth mattered.
Sheila had to dig deep down in herself to deny these thoughts. The earth would not tell her who she was, even if it was all she’d ever known. No, for her, the light was everything. After all, whatever grows in the earth doesn’t grow without light. She’d asked her teachers about that one when she was younger and they never had an answer. They would insist she accept her place in the deep earth, that light was for those with the gift of sight. And she knew a journey to the end of the earth’s soil, a journey to the edge of light, was never going to be easy, but here she was, turning her life toward a unity of purpose, a convergence of vision and feeling.
When her relentless digging tired her, she swore she started seeing lights beyond the way she could, but they were only the ones on the backs of her eyelids, those stars of the lid, as she barreled forward. Sometimes she’d even close her eyes while digging, tricking herself into thinking she was soaring through some portal way out in the remotest corners of space. One time Sheila even forgot she was digging at all and found herself digging while asleep, stopping only when her nose smelled limestone deposits near a riverbed she almost failed to dig deep enough to pass under without drowning.
A few days later she ran smack into something dead. She saw and smelled it was another mole and it filled her with dread. She didn’t want to think it was dead. Why couldn’t the dead mole move? Because it’s dead, she said. But how did I get it into my head that it shouldn’t be dead? Because it’s impossible to know dead things. Dead things have the luxury of stillness I do not. So she wiped the death off her nose as fast as she could and went on, somehow, hurtling toward the light.
One dead mole couldn’t stop her mission, but, still, she felt strange for a time. She had been told all animals die, but she’d never seen a dead mole before in all her digging life. It took her traveling to the end of light to meet this stifled mortality. It was as tragic and forgettable as life is when you look at it without illusions. Still, she pressed on, digging forward since she had to, since she thought that knowing where light ends meant knowing where it begins, or if it begins at all. She sensed light could be a constant but she couldn’t commit to such an idea till much later, she told herself, after she accomplished her mission. So day after day, night after night, she dug on, dirt streaming like nightwater droplets, soft and rough, past her shiny cheeks and poky nose and flippery claws.
Days later she hit something else. She thought it smelled like the dead mole from before, but no, this was worse. This was a whole family of dead moles, cruddy little dirt follicles clinging to their fuzz. She was struck by how they lay there still, slung around each other, as if in a ring dance where love reigned over death’s grubby grasp. It looked like they’d been hit by a bomb and buried in embrace. Sheila thought it was as tragic as moles could be.
And she couldn’t help but worry. Why was she seeing all these dead moles? The more she wanted to understand the light, the sadder the world became for her. She wondered if she could carry on, listless now as she was. Every time she looked above ground she noticed in her blurry way how the horizon wasn’t getting any closer, yet still she went on. She had to go on, even if her mind was still wandering in the shadows of death.
She kept feeling this tingle in her nose. It was a kind of fear where she thought that in the next inch in front of her there’d be more dead moles, rotting and looming, suspended in cradling earth. But how could she turn back now? Nothing could stop her, even as she scraped against all the little bones of more dead moles all around. Each scrape made her bleed. She trailed little blood blots all over, cutting a red black trail for future moles. She hoped they too would trace their journeys to the resting place of light.
Yet after a while she didn’t know where she was anymore. So far from home, it was all her home now. If she died on the way, she thought, so be it. She started pretending she was an earth version of the dolphins from the book she read in school. The soil sea was the real sea, she thought, where no light penetrates even inches down. Then other times her mind wandered to the meaning of things, which she dismissed. Light was more profound than the self-interest that meaning requires, she thought. The world, she’d say to herself, can’t be bothered to mean anything. The world is only illuminated. That is the great mystery.
Sheila started getting skinny for a mole. She felt that maybe she was dying. There was plenty of food and she’d kept herself alive, but it was like her voyage had depleted her on a basic life level she couldn’t replenish but with light, and even then she wasn’t sure at this point. Then one day the earth ended. She poked her head above the ground and spread against it all was the tossing waters of blues and greens and grays going as far out as anyone, mole or not, could see.
She’d never seen such water before. In fact, she was unsure how she was seeing anything at all, since she was still a mole that mostly couldn’t see. But it looked like the ocean she’d read about in her dolphin book. She gazed out, plopping her paws atop her hole. The sun was setting like so many times she’d seen before in the smears and blurs of diffuse, impossible colors. Light played on the waters, in all its ribboning, singing silent graces across an untraceable sky.
This is where it ends for me, she thought. I can’t dig any further since there’s no more earth. She drew a breath and watched what she could see of the reds and oranges deepen and ripen to blues and purples. Perched on the bluff, she hung over the ocean’s edge, when, suddenly, she felt tugging and shaking and fell down to the beach below. Sheila couldn’t dig anymore and didn’t know how to get back to the reliable earth above.
That’s when the water started reaching for her and dragged her in. She thought of the dead moles and the water and the light as she sank. It felt like the end, but something hard and round and tile-like came up under her. She clung to it. It was a sea turtle named Gene, and he told her he couldn’t take her with him because she belonged to the earth and not the sea. She asked him if he knew where the light ended, where it came from, but he couldn’t answer. So sorry, he said, but no one has ever been where light ends. I’m not sure it has an end. He swam close and let the surf toss her back to the beach, where she rolled wet and cold in the sand. All she could do was burrow in and sleep the deepest sleep. And she slept and slept and, soon, slipped away to death. She whispered something as Gene looked on, but he couldn’t make it out.
Sheila died dreaming of light, no closer at the edge of the sea than it had been when she’d set out. Years later, back at home, the other moles said she had gone all the way to the horizon, that she had gone to where the light merges with darkness, where seeing and feeling were one. They said she’d seen where light ends, which, they taught, is where it begins. And one day, they said, she would return. They felt it deep in the earth of their being. What they didn’t know was that when Sheila died the waves took her far out to sea.