I drove the shovel into the dirt behind Grandmother’s house because that was the custom, plant a tree for the dead within seven days or the dead wander loose. My name is Kjersti Aune, and I hum when I am scared. I don’t decide to do it. My throat starts on its own, low, an old tune Grandmother taught me before I could walk, and I only notice I’m doing it when someone else points it out.
That morning nobody pointed it out. Aunt Solveig stayed at the garden edge with her arms locked around her own body, eyes fixed on the digging, offering zero real words. Neighbors keep away from this fence stretch now, ever since Grandmother’s burial, they lift a hand from the road then walk on, as if the whole bloodline carries a weight they refuse to speak.
“Not there,” she said at last. “Move over. Past the fence post.”
“Why does it matter where,” I said. “She’s dead either way.”
Solveig didn’t answer right away. Her mouth opened, closed again, and I understood later that some words in our family aren’t supposed to be spoken plain, only pointed at, the way she pointed her chin toward the fence post instead of naming what waited under it.
I moved the hole. The shovel slid better in that spot, soil loose and almost inviting, so I told myself the ease meant something good. Roughly three feet down the edge hit an object nothing like stone. Some hollow thump came, maybe timber against timber. I went onto my knees and scraped the earth away with my bare hands.
That object was no wood at all.
Hair came up first, long and tangled, wrapped around a round shape. I pulled again and the soil collapsed, a head rolling out of the hole and bumping my shin. Those eyes stayed wide open. From the neck below hung threads of dark thin stuff, still damp, every strand shifting by itself at a crawl, looking the way things do when nothing has informed them their original body is finished.
No scream left me. I wished it would. A weak high noise escaped instead, steam lifting off the thing in a drawn-out hiss that drifted past my face, and buried inside that hiss sat a woman’s voice, sharp and shredded, the noise a throat makes just before it fails for good.
Solveig reached my side prior to me realizing I had toppled onto my back. Her grip locked on my wrist with real force, enough force that a purple mark showed by nightfall.
“Finding her was never meant for you,” she told me.
“Her who,” I said. “Whose head is that.”
“A grandmother of ours, further back than anyone living remembers her name. Great-grandmother buried her here. Kept her quiet.” Solveig wouldn’t look down at it. “The family says she cursed her own daughters first, out of grief, out of rage at dying young, and every woman since has carried a piece of that curse without asking for it. Every woman in this family knows where the ground is soft and where it isn’t. I told you, past the fence post.”
“You knew this was here.”
“I knew where not to dig. That’s different from knowing. And certain matters inside this family never get spoken plain, you just edge warnings around them, because saying them open appears to pull them nearer.”
That afternoon we covered it once more, further down, rocks set over the top and a small tree pushed straight through the broken dirt, roots meant to pin the thing the way fasteners keep a cover closed. Solveig spoke the phrases her mother always used, quiet and rapid, speech older than either of us. The humming rose from me without intent, the melody sliding under her speech until the line between her sound and mine vanished.
I figured the whole business had finished there.
#
Three weeks after that, the night Marit reached age four, my girl began making that identical melody while she slept.
Through the wall of the tiny place I lease a couple towns distant I caught it, nowhere near Grandmother’s garden, nowhere near soft soil. Earlier the same evening I let her put on the necklace Grandmother left behind, only for the birthday pictures, a slender chain holding a dull stone Solveig once warned me never to remove from the land. I took it from her before sleep. Doing it sooner would have been wiser.
Outside her doorway in the dark I waited, hearing a four-year-old’s throat carry a song no one ever showed her, note matching note, the same low tug I produce without thinking. I opened the door. Marit rested face-up, lids shut, the hum steady like her breath. Dark fine hair freed from its braid lay across the pillow, strands rising and dropping in little flows, under the pillow something seemed to pull each one down then release, down then release.
Her name left my mouth. The humming kept on. Louder I called a second time, and her eyes came open, wide and damp and no longer hers, fixed on the ceiling while a voice too even for any child spoke, “She wants the rest of it back.”
“The rest of what,” left me, my own words thin and hurried.
Marit’s stare slid sideways to me, slow, and her mouth kept moving after the words stopped, the sentence unfinished, something behind her teeth still shaping the next part and unable to push it out.
I called Solveig that night. She didn’t sound surprised.
“We didn’t bury all of her.” Solveig stopped, then corrected herself. “The head was only one piece. There’s more, somewhere, split up on purpose so no single grave could hold the whole of it. Great-grandmother wanted her weak. Not gone.”
“Why would anyone split a body like that.”
“Because whole, she comes back too angry to leave the family alone. Split, she only takes pieces. A hum here. A word there.” Solveig went quiet, then said, “Your girl got the humming. Grandmother had it too, before she went. So did I, when I was young, before I learned to hold it in.”
“You still have it.”
Solveig didn’t answer that.
I drove out to Grandmother’s garden again the next morning, Marit buckled in the back, still humming soft under her breath, eyes locked on the glass the whole way, following some shape along the trees I could never catch. Once we pulled into the yard the young tree we had set in the ground had twisted crooked overnight, trunk leaning hard down toward the torn soil, reaching for the dirt as if trying to catch whatever moved beneath.
I dug again. I told myself I was checking. Only checking. That the stones would be right where we’d left them.
The stones were scattered. The opening beneath them gaped tidy and clear its walls even and unbroken with zero soil tumbled down and zero traces of any tool as though the ground had simply split so something could rise while every grain nearby stayed exactly as it was.
Marit stayed frozen at the garden edge thin and still her humming growing louder while a slippery form without color in the grass behind her started dragging itself toward the fence post leaving threads that twisted alone as they searched the soil for the bits that still belonged to it.
—
Author Bio:
Malang, Indonesia, is home to Fendy S. Tulodo. Words and sound are his tools. He looks at how time drags for some and flies for others, and why certain ties hold on long after they should let go. By day, motorcycles are what he sells. By night, he becomes Nep Kid, recording songs that fit the mood. His work sits quietly between what gets said and what’s really felt. Find him on Instagram: @fendysatria_
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