A Hole In The Ground (Short Story)

Somehow, it had not occurred to Hannah that it could or would be hot at the Grand Canyon. She was not the kind of person who thrives in heat and she was consequently less appreciative of the scenery than she might have been.

The overlook was crowded with tourists. Most of them were speaking unfamiliar languages, though Hannah thought she heard words that might have been German, or Polish, or something else equally suggestive of eastern Europe. She gave her water bottle a slight shake. It was almost empty.

“It’s really hot,” she said to Mark.

“It’s damn hot,” he corrected.

She drained what was left of her water, then looked covertly at Mark’s bottle, which she was sure was much fuller. Mark was always careful with supplies. He was an outdoorsman, a survivalist. She was not.
She groaned, and leaned back until her head came to rest on the large sandstone boulder which she had claimed as her seat.

“What did you expect? It’s August, and we’re in Arizona,” Mark said.

“I don’t know what I expected, I just know that it wasn’t this,” she said.

She picked her head up slightly to see Mark lean over the rail and look deep into the canyon. His right leg was bouncing up and down impatiently.

“What’s the adjective for ‘Arizona,’ anyway? ‘Arizonan’? ‘Arizonian’?”

“Hell if I know,” Mark said, and spat over the rail. “Probably ‘Arizonan,’ I would guess. It sounds about right.”

He looked over at her. She let her head fall back again and closed her eyes tight.

“Ready to go yet?” he asked.





“What do you mean it wasn’t that great?” Mark asked.

She waited, listening to the sound of the tires hissing and spinning over the packed earth.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, “I guess I just wanted something more from it. People tell you your whole life about the Grand Canyon, you know? How it’s this incredible, life changing event—the first time you see it. It’s supposed to be a defining moment. I wanted that, I just felt like I didn’t get it.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. Hannah heard a tone of disbelief in his voice. He even sounded almost hurt. He put a hand into his pocket, which she knew contained a box with a diamond ring. He had been carrying it with him everywhere since his failed proposal to her in May.

She looked out the window, saw all the vastness of the desert, its unbroken immensity under the setting sun. It was so flat here that she felt like the horizon was much farther off than normal, stretching out for what looked like forever before meeting the sky, which also looked wider and stranger than she could ever remember. She wondered if this was how the world had looked when she was a child.

“I guess… Well, when you get right down to it, get rid of all the myth and the bullshit, isn’t it just a big hole in the ground?”

She looked over at Mark. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses, but his mouth was drawn in a tight, hard line, and the skin was stretched taut over his large knuckles as they gripped the wheel. He shook his head a few times and did not look at her.

“Damn it, Hannah, it’s the Grand fucking Canyon, not a ‘hole in the ground.’ What the hell were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “Just not this.”

They sat in silence as the car rolled on through the desert, toward a horizon which seemed a world away.