Property Line by Elena Rotzokou

The year the sinkhole opened behind Marla’s house we were already halfway through the brisket and three handles of vodka, the folding tables bowing under deviled eggs sweating in paprika, the kids ricocheting between the trampoline and the inflatable pool while the dogs patrolled for dropped meat, and someone’s drone whining overhead because even out here, forty minutes past the last strip mall and a full bar of nothing, nobody could resist documenting themselves rustic, and the sinkhole at first passed for shadow at the edge of the property line where the grass never quite committed, a softening in the earth like something exhaling from below, and we might have ignored it entirely if Kyle’s little boy hadn’t sunk to his shins mid-sprint, emerging shrieking and thrilled, one sneaker gone, the rest of us laughing the way adults do when danger still feels recreational.

We circled it with Solo cups in hand, peering down into a dark that didn’t reflect light so much as take it, the dads proposing old wells or septic tanks or abandoned Cold War bunkers because every hole demands a backstory, the moms calling the kids closer without stepping back themselves, dirt collapsing in polite crumbs along the rim, and it was Marla who said it had been there before, just smaller, a dip she’d meant to fill, the way she’d meant to repaint the guest room and meant to tell Darren she was tired of the commute and meant to schedule the colonoscopy she kept joking about, and Darren waving her off with the tongs like he waved off everything else, grease stippling his forearms, telling her the ground settles, babe, that’s what ground does.

Maybe that would have been it except the dogs would not come when called, Hank and Bishop and little Miso pacing the perimeter, noses low, whining at something we couldn’t smell, and the drone lowering itself until its camera hovered over the lip, its red light blinking into the dark, and we leaned in to watch what the screen saw, our faces crowded into Kyle’s phone, sunburned and briefly unified, and on the display the hole appeared wider than it had a moment before, not dramatically, just enough that the grass we were standing on began to look provisional.

Someone joked about sacrifice and someone else about property values and the kids, bored again, returned to the trampoline where their bodies rose and fell in obedient arcs, and it was Darren who nudged a loose slab of sod into the center with the toe of his sandal, testing it like bathwater, and we watched it drop without sound, no thud, no splash, just subtraction, and that was when Marla began counting, not loudly, just under her breath, the way she did during hide-and-seek, and without meaning to we all fell quiet enough to hear her, one two three four five six, counting children, counting dogs, counting what could not be replaced with a call to insurance, and we felt the shift then, the small arithmetic of exposure, how quickly a yard becomes an edge.

Later, when the fireflies rose from the tall grass and the sinkhole had widened enough that we could no longer pretend it was decorative, we dragged the tables closer to the house without discussing it, plates balanced on our knees, laughter recalibrated into something thinner, and one by one the dogs stopped pacing and lay down with their heads aimed toward the dark, listening as if waiting for their names to be called.

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ELENA ROTZOKOU — Elena is a writer based in New York City and a PhD candidate in English at Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in ONE ART and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Neologism. Her fiction is forthcoming in Gooseberry Pie Lit Mag, where she makes her prose debut.

Art by RURI KATO — Ruri is an artist based in Japan. She works in a range of medium, her most recent interest being calligraphy ink.