The plan is to escape. We scratch out maps, diagrams, and the crafty among us make a diorama—an abhorrent bastardization of mouse skeletons and questionable glue—and we plot our escape as though the task were already complete.
We imagine stars. The sun is too big to remember; all we yearn for are pinholes in the black. Colors are painful to think, but we must remember. We no longer have human tongues, so we squeak and speak in vibrations the words: indigo, mauve, white. But we remember only the names of colors, not the sight: everything in these tunnels is a different shade of dark. Instead of blue, a shade we remember as calming, we say soft dark. Instead of red, we say hot dark. A mouse sniffing in the tunnels is green. A worm spewing dirt when pressed, the palest yellow. Often an odor on our body will say more than we mean and tell us of mall or mother or ocean, and we will dig furiously until we forget—some words are too big to bear in this small space. We never pretend to be smarter than we are, and we never forget that we agreed to this experiment in the bunker—for money, to be first on the frontier of gene splicing, to escape. The scientists promised us fame and fortune, and though we arrived at the bunker for assorted reasons, our one desire was the same: They promised us new lives.
The scientists did not lie, not when we were human. We signed a mountain of papers back then with fingers instead of claws, even though we saw the door made of steel and knew the camp’s iron boundaries went far above and below ground. Only a mole could dig its way out, the lead scientist had said and laughed. Mole-people, we learned, do not laugh. We dig.
We are certain we lived simple lives before the grafting and the hemoglobin transfusions and the descent down, down, down. The sows had many appointments and fanciful pens, the boars drove trucks with vanity plates. This is the story of the first mole-people. The language of the moles grants us little more to tell. As humans, did our kiss paralyze? Did our love come in the spring and leave with the cold? Did we raise our eyes to sun instead of down to soil and ask, please, can you give a little bit more? We cannot say. We cannot say what is important and what is memory soured—we only trust the tingling in our noses. What we can say is that the scientists who made us said a group of moles is called a labour, and we agree.
We are much larger than your average mole with our too-long ribcages and velvet fur over calloused skin. When we tried to mate with the moles of earth or join their labour, they scorned us. Squealed and spit and tunneled off in directions our large bodies could not go. The scientists spoke to us on their loud system (a voice we sometimes mistake for our own—how we yearn for that voice!) and said to mate with one another—better for the future, for the genes. In the second mating cycle, we bore our first mole that lived. We named the pup. She was smaller than us, and, therefore, more precious. Moles are solitary creatures, they said. We will watch for progress, they said. You will get out soon, they said.
They were not wrong: moles are solitary. We split apart for a long time when the pup disappeared. We know who took her. She’s too useful to their research, but we could not decipher their overbearing scents to make snout nor tail of which tunnel they took her down—the stench of man is so intense, it becomes a headache. We tunneled away, instead of toward our pup, our sweet girl whose human ears were one of her only reminders of our lives above ground, whose body shuddered during sleep. Since the procedures, we no longer dream. We knew she could dream by the way she whimpered.
After she was taken, we split. It’s only natural, we assumed, for mole-people to try different tunnels after a loss. Some of us burrowed toward the scent of rain—more earthworms—others to the dry soil as it promised mice and warm slumber. We forgot colors and no longer squeaked. Our vibrations were electrical currents too weak to wake a worm. Yet we were satisfied. We no longer yearned for happiness—the scientists lived up to part of their bargain: we had new lives. The rest of the deal—fame and fortune—lived above ground, where we no longer belonged. Their promise of us getting out soon, a date without end, was voided when we became more mole than human. We did not care. We dug without direction. Every now and then, our tunnels would cross, and springtime drives us to each other faster, but we mate with need, not passion. Until this year, this rainy season, when one of us bears again a pup who breathes and who stays breathing. The pup turns to the few of us remaining, only five now, the rest turned full mole or dead, and speaks.
Do you know the language of moles? If we had more words, we could describe its beauty to you, but we have but one, the one we heard from him, this pup a paw’s length in size, and with one word we knew it was time to escape, out of the steel traps, beneath the enclosure’s deepest gates, beyond the scientists’ bunker doors. And what humanity will make of us now we do not know. What humanity we have left is skin patches and thumbs. But we have our plans. We have our labour. We have one among us who can speak, and so begins the story of the first mole-people with our first word and pact: Dig.
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Kyle Teller (she/her/hers) writes fiction exploring the body, identity, and magic. Currently, she is working toward her Ph.D. in English. Her writing appears in Atticus Review, The Pinch, Whiskey Island, and elsewhere. More of her storytelling can be found at kyleteller.com.