It’s macabre. Terrifying. Too real to think about. Even now, with all I know, I can only walk along its edges in my head. Sometimes the great pull of darkness has to be resisted. Sometimes truth is just worry, and sometimes worrying can ruin a person.

I take another breath. They’re getting more difficult, too difficult.

That’s when I touch the corner of something stiffer than dirt and icy. Frozen. I try to pull it from the ground with gentle tugs that make my heart ache; I’m terrified now that the rest of the hole could collapse. But I’ve got my hands around something heavy that isn’t plant life. Something curved and smooth: nothing like the dirt I’ve felt on and under and in my fingertips for the longest time. When I remove it, I take out my light again, and I see, attached to its smoothness, a ragged flap, textured and gnarled.

A flap of skin, the color of dried blood.

I throw the gruesome handful away with a full body shudder and a guttural groan. It lands near me, and when I illuminate it, something glints.

Not human skin.

It’s got handles and a structure and—

It’s a purse.

My heart judders in my chest.

A purse.

I hold it close to my chest and feel an urge to burst out into sobs. Evidence of humanity.

It’s humming inside. Alive. I marvel at it in my hands. A small, structured purse; too dirty and ratty and eaten to make sense of. But I feel my breathing stop again. The exterior is caked in dirt, and I scrub at it with my unfeeling fingers, as delicately as I can. I open the crusted latch, only to find a mess of beetles inside, not all of them dead. I heave again and shake them out furiously, crying, wiping dirt and tears from my face. They’ve eaten through the other side. An empty lipstick canister, the moist gunk inside long consumed. Some mixed coins. And a small notebook, its pages mostly eaten, embossed with the golden initials …

M

F

H.

The memories crash over me with such force that I lose all feeling; I am not me, I am no more flesh and blood than a scrape of dirt-brown matter, limp as a slug at the bottom of the pit.

But I find myself holding the purse to my chest as if it’s my beating heart, as if it’s the only remedy for the only sickness.

Mama.

There will be questions later, but there are no questions in my mind then.

She must have fallen.

She must have died, by no wish of her own or anyone else.