The Word ‘Hole’

Katharine Kilalea | An excerpt from the novel Ok, Mr. Field | Tim Duggan Books | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,708 words)
The sun was shining brightly off the whiteness of the page before me when I opened the newspaper. It was hot. Watery noises rose from the tide pool where children were swimming. The silence was otherwise disturbed only by occasional shouts from their strident games mistress who, since the narrow windows encircling the courtyard hid the upper and lower reaches of the world from view, I could hear but not see.
My gaze rested on the newspaper in front of me, whose pages I turned without thinking. The headlines (the news was always about the heat wave or the cricket) were immaterial to me. I had only a vague sense of what was going on. The news interested me only insofar as it provided something to look at and I let my eyes engage momentarily with this or that piece of information, not so much reading as giving them something to do to pass the time. Then I placed the paper facedown on the table, stood up, and sat down again.
I’d never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician’s sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn’t even read a novel since before long I’d always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of. Yet that morning, beneath the obituaries and the classifieds, the crossword drew me in. Who invented the telephone? What nationality was the first dog in space? My hand picked up the pen as if of its own accord. It felt pleasurable to be filling in the empty grid. It felt like doing something, a meaningful activity. Like work, even, to be exerting effort and producing results. The answers came easy at first. But one question led to another and sometimes, beneath the crossword questions, I detected other questions, small, half-formulated questions, questions that were almost too vague to warrant my attention. Why do you just sit there? Why don’t you go out? Why don’t you go for a walk or sit in the garden? But it was too hot to be outside and the grass was full of ants from the figs that had fallen from the tree. And what is the point of walking when there is nowhere you have to be? So I returned to the crossword, which wasn’t as inviting as before. The boxes looked somehow sinister and without purpose. Like molds, or the husks left over from something that had been there once and been taken away. Like holes, I thought. Empty holes. I said the word hole. Hole. Said out loud, it led in two directions: Hole. Whole. There was something about it that my ear liked. Read more…
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