There was once a little girl who dug herself a very very
very very very deep hole. No one had ever paid her much attention and she
thought that by digging a very very very very very deep hole they would be sure
to notice her. Well, at the very least they would notice her hole and shortly
after that they were sure to notice her at the bottom of it.
So she took a shovel from her daddy's garage where all the
garden tools were kept and she found a place in the yard that wasn't too
conspicuous or too inconspicuous and where none of her mother's precious
pretty flowers were growing and that wouldn't damage her daddy's all-important
lawn and she started digging away. She dug all afternoon and into the
night and all through the next morning, too. She kept right on digging for days
and days and days. She probably slept at some point; common sense tells us that
she must have eaten something; but when she slept or what she ate we can't say.
Mostly she just dug
and dug
and dug
and dug
and dug.
The question is asked: "Where did she put all the dirt
that she dug as she dug? Surely there came a point when she could no longer
just throw it out of the hole above her or it wouldn't have been a very deep
hole.
Well, fortunately for her (and us), these aren't the kinds
of questions you have to answer in fairytales. Instead, you just dig.
You don't worry about where the dug dirt goes.
The sun went up.
The sun went down.
Stars twinkled above her.
And then they twinkled out.
She dug through her whole childhood. She dug through her
teen years. Then she dug through her twenties and thirties. She kept right on
digging until she lost track of how long she'd been digging altogether. That's
the thing about digging. There is never any end to it. There is never a bottom
to a hole. Wherever you stop is the bottom. And where she finally stopped it
was pretty far down. When she looked up, she could blot out the whole sun with
the tip of her forefinger.
"This must be deep enough," she thought
and waited.
And waited and waited and waited and waited. She refused to
call up from the bottom of her hole because that would defeat the whole
purpose. What she wanted was to be found at the bottom of the hole.
But no one was finding her.
Then she realized she'd made a very fundamental mistake.
She'd brought the shovel with her. There it stood, stuck in the dirt where she
left it when she stopped digging, two feet away. How was anyone going to dig
her out of the hole if the shovel was down here with her? Even worse, what if
someone saw the hole and thought it was just a hole and decided to fill it back
in without looking first to see who might be at the bottom of it? Suddenly it
occurred to her that what she might have actually dug by accident was her own
grave!
Darnit! This hadn't been a very good idea at all, she began
to think, with a frown. Somehow she'd gotten her fairytales all bollixed
up. What she should have done was build a tower from which she could let
her long hair down, not a tunnel underground. A tower gets you noticed by
princes. A tunnel gets you cold and damp and crawled on by worms. No, this
hadn't been a good idea at all.
Now at this point in a fairytale something unexpected and
miraculous happens and everything turns out for the best. But not so much in
this fairytale. By now the little girl wasn't little anymore and no longer a
girl but a mature woman with long white hair and brittle yellow nails and a
cracked voice that could hardly carry halfway up the incredibly deep hole
she'd dug for herself even if she had been inclined to call for help at this
late date which she wasn't.
In fact, she'd grown used to the dank and the chill and the
worms and the moles and the roots and the tiny dime-sized view of the world
above that she could see through the other end of her hole the way you'd look
at another planet miles and miles and miles away as if through the eyepiece of
a telescope. So she stayed there and no one ever did notice her and eventually
that was just fine with her because on the plus side no one ever bothered her
either and she came to forget why she ever wanted to be noticed in the
first place.
And that is pretty much the happiest way a story like this
can ever end.
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