Excerpt: A God In My Pocket

It was lunch time, and Jake was a little less than half done with the odd grave. As he pulled out his sandwich, apple, and chips, Jake mused about his shovel. The old man had asked him to put it down when he was done, and Jake sensed that this was an important order. So, as he sat to eat, he laid the shovel neatly across his lap. He wouldn’t relinquish its touch until he was truly done.

He looked up at the canopy of the trees, with branches splayed above him like a fuzzy evergreen roof. He was surprised to see that the mist had fully enclosed the space around the trees, as if creating a private room just for him to work in. It was both frightening and comforting. He felt that nothing could get in to harm him, but he was concerned at another feeling—that it would take more than just walking through the misty barrier for him to get out.

As he munched on his pastrami on rye, moving through midnight, he thought about the day that was halfway behind him. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t figure out how this strange situation had come to him. His morning had been so usual, so normal. But then, he got to the deli and saw the strange woman and man who were now his employers. It had all happened so quickly. But how had they called him out? How had they found him?

It seemed to all start when he found that the chips he liked had been restocked. That was when he had first seen Ma-na and Grandfather. But he shook his head, thinking of what all his logical friends would say, what his parents would have said. Silly thought. Cheddar-flavored, deep-fried potato slices just didn’t have anything to do with jobs working in strange graveyards for people with abnormal eye color, starry complexions, and vanishing shoulders.

Before he could ponder it much further, a flash of motion caught his eye. He stopped in the middle of crunching a chip to look down toward the grave. And there it was again. A wisp of smoke seemed to appear, darting across the grave from one side to the other. It vanished. Then, it dashed back again, the other way. But wait—the first one had been a greenish color. The second was pink. And there it was again! A large circle of white smoke flowed swiftly from one corner across to the opposite corner of the hole.

Jake shook his head and looked again. No, the smoke wasn’t just appearing and disappearing. It appeared as if each puff was moving through the grave. As if there were paths under the earth, and the grave was a big intersection in the middle of them. Traffic just moved right through.

He looked down into his chip bag again. Peering at it from the corner of his eye, he crumpled it up with the remaining chips inside and stuffed it back in the paper bag. Then, hefting the shovel, he side-stepped over to the hole to look more closely.

Nothing. There was no more movement.

Deciding to abandon his apple for a snack later, Jake jumped down into the hole. He felt the twang in his right hip and ignored it. It only happened every once in a while, and it had been explained away in his youth as a bit of bursitis brought on by a slip and fall accident that had strained the muscles in the area. That Jake didn’t remember having such an accident was beside the point. His doctor had been certain that was what caused the inflammation and pain.

He felt around the sides of the grave, looking for weak spots in the walls, feeling for the dampness that the puffy little clouds might have left behind, feeling for the integrity of the walls. The last thing he needed was a cave-in. But nothing felt out of place. The soil was dry, the grave walls were sturdy. Jake shrugged and decided maybe he hadn’t seen anything important.

He absentmindedly massaged his hip with his hand, bent sideways to stretch it out, looked up at the canopy again, and kept digging.