The Weight of a Teaspoon

The goldfish was named Admiral and now the Admiral was dead, so they were digging.

"Here's deep enough," Soren said.

"Not yet." Maya kept scraping. She had the little kitchen spoon, the one her mom used for measuring, and she was using it wrong on purpose, jabbing it into the soil under the tomato plants. "I want it dark. Where the roots are."

Soren held the tissue with the Admiral in it. "Fish don't care how deep."

"Fish don't care about anything anymore. That's the problem." She lifted a spoonful and held it up between them. It was almost black, and it smelled like rain even though it hadn't rained. "Smell that."

"That's just dirt."

"It smells alive."

"Dirt isn't alive. Dirt is what's left over after things stop being alive." Soren set the Admiral down gently on a rock. "It's, like, ground-up rock and dead leaves."

Maya frowned at the spoon. "Then why does it smell?"

Soren opened his mouth to say something about decomposition and then closed it, because that wasn't quite an answer, and he could tell it wasn't. That smell had a name. His uncle grew mushrooms in the basement and the whole room smelled like that, and his uncle had said a word once.

"Petrichor," Soren said. "No. That's rain on rock. There's another one. For that smell." He got out the notebook and wrote petrichor and then crossed it out.

"Made by what, though." Maya was still holding the spoon up. "Smells are made by something. Flowers make flower smell. What's making the dirt smell?"

"The dirt."

"The dirt isn't doing anything, you just said. It's leftovers." She brought the spoon close to her own nose and breathed in slow. "Something in here is breathing out."

Soren looked at the spoon for a long moment. Then he looked at his uncle's word, the crossed-out one, and wrote a different word underneath it. Geosmin. His uncle had said bacteria made it. Little ones in the ground.

"Okay," he said carefully. "So there's bacteria in it. That's normal. There's bacteria on everything."

"How many."

"In what?"

Maya shook the spoon slightly, so a few dark crumbs fell off the edge. "In that. In one spoon. Guess."

Soren committed, because that was the rule with himself. When you had to guess, you guessed all the way. "A thousand."

"That's nothing. A thousand is a classroom of classrooms."

"A million, then."

Maya didn't answer. She was doing the thing where she got quiet and her eyes went somewhere. Then she said, "My dad told me there are more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches. And people always say that like it's the biggest number there is."

"It kind of is."

"But nobody ever picks up the sand and asks what's living on it." She set the spoon down between them on the rock, next to the Admiral, like the two things belonged at the same funeral. "Look it up. The real number."

Soren got out his phone. He read for a while. His face changed the way it changed when a thing turned out to be bigger than the box he'd built for it.

"Say it," Maya said.

"A billion." He said it quietly. "Up to a billion bacteria. In one teaspoon."

Maya looked at the little spoon. Her mouth moved but nothing came out.

"That's not all," Soren said, reading faster now. "There's fungus. Threads. Yards of it, in one spoon, if you pulled it all out straight. And protozoa, thousands, and those hunt the bacteria, so it's, it's not just a lot of things, it's a whole. It's animals eating animals. In there." He looked up. "There's more living things in that spoon than there are people. On the whole planet."

"How many people are there."

"Eight billion."

"And there's a billion in one spoon." Maya crouched down until she was eye level with the spoon on the rock. "So eight spoons."

"Eight spoons of dirt has as many things living in it as the whole world has people." Soren looked at the garden bed, the whole long dark stretch of it under the tomatoes. Then he looked at the yard. Then he stopped looking, because it wasn't a thing you could keep looking at and stay standing up.

Maya wasn't standing up. She was crouched right down over the spoon, closer and closer.

"They're all in there right now," she said. "Right now. Doing stuff. Eating each other. Breathing out that smell, so I could smell them. That's what I smelled. That was them saying hi." She laughed, but it came out shaky. "I smelled a billion things and I thought it was just dirt."

"Everybody thinks it's just dirt."

"Everybody's walking around on top of it." She pressed her hands flat on the ground on both sides of the hole, not touching the spoon, just holding the earth like you'd hold something you didn't want to wake. "There's more of them under one footprint than there are of us anywhere. And we don't even know their names. Nobody named a single one."

Soren thought about that. "Some of them nobody's even found yet. That's what it said. Most of them we can't grow in a lab, so we don't know what they are. They're down there being alive and we've never met them."

They were both quiet. The Admiral lay on his rock, small and finished, the only dead thing for a hundred yards in any direction.

"He's not going in the dirt," Maya said finally.

"What?"

"He's going in the crowd." She picked up the spoon and tipped the black soil back into the open hole, gently, all one billion of them pouring home. "Put him in. Let them come get him."

Soren laid the Admiral down in the dark, and the soil went over him, and every crumb of it was moving.