Trash. It’s all around us.
In our oceans, our backyards, our homes, even inside our own bodies. The long term effects of improperly disposed waste will prove to be catastrophic. Air pollution. Waterway blockage. Infrastructure deterioration. Disease. How did we get here? Where do we—
The narrator spoke with a soft English accent while a living room full of stoners watched, hypnotized by the screen.
I sat at the edge of the couch holding my upper leg—the leg that broke my fall when I jumped off Verona’s balcony. Each throb sent sparks up my spine that rang against my eardrums, and something smelled like dead flowers.
“Bummer about your girlfriend, dude,” Mark said as he poured a container of pills against his coffee table. “Don’t worry though. This one’s on the house, for real.”
I lifted my nose and sniffed the haze of cigarette smoke that hovered over the room like fruit flies.
“Fuckin’ Mildred though,” Mark muttered as he counted the loose drugs he had scattered across the table. “It’s never who you expect, right? I mean, she was livin’ here, you think I woulda noticed all the weird shit she had goin’ on. Havana syndrome, Ghost sickness, Morgellons.”
“Mildred,” I repeated, smelling the pillow next to my face. I didn’t know who Mildred was.
“Yeah, dude. Did you know she was an actor? Not like a crisis actor though. She was the real thing.” He dropped several of the pills he was counting into an open sandwich bag. “But then the government got under her skin. Disease. Mind control. All of it. I bet they even gave her that gun she used to…well, yeah. Bummer.”
His voice mixed with the British narrator’s stung worse than my leg.
—the hydrogen sulfide emissions alone can wreak havoc on your body. If you live next to a landfill for long enough, your sex drive will vanish, your stomach will shrink, you’ll even start losing your senses. Taste, hearing, smell—
I sniffed my shirt. The one covered in dried blood, come, and pink floral patterns. There was the source—worse than a blown out stink bug.
“Here ya’ go, dude.” Mark handed me the bag of drugs. “Sorry, I couldn’t give you more than that. Economics and all.”
I picked several tablets free and popped them into my mouth. Their bitter trail ran against the back of my Adam’s apple, and I’m pretty sure it was either Vicodin or Xanax. Maybe both. It had been too long. I stuffed the rest into my pocket.
“Kurt,” a voice called from across the room. “Is that you?” A twig of a woman emerged from the clouds of smoke.
“Oh, Kurt.” she said, falling onto the couch next to me. “I’m so sorry.” The cords in her neck looked like they were about to snap, as if they were the only things holding her together.
“You don’t deserve this. You’re good. You’re a good person,” she continued, placing her leg over mine. “So don’t listen to those things people are saying about you. Okay?”
“The things people are saying,” I repeated. The sharp bone of her kneecap dug into my bruised muscle, and I considered taking another pill.
What were people saying?
—your garbage. It can attract all manner of predators: coyotes. grizzly bears, buzzards. This food waste becomes an all you can eat buffet, destroying the natural ecosystem. When there are too many predators, the prey don’t stand a fighting chance—
“Shit, I left my cigarettes downstairs,” Mark said, suddenly standing up. “Can someone pause this?” He left the room, leaving the pile of loose pills unguarded.
“You know,” Stacy said. “I can go to the memorial show with you if you want. Just so you’re not alone.”
The Xanax or Vicodin or whatever it was must have been starting to work because her voice turned into radio static.
“The whole thing was my idea,” she continued, watching the documentary as she spoke. “The whole class is each going to paint their favorite animals. Verona loved that kind of shit.”
I leaned over Stacy, reaching my fingers out towards the coffee table, and pain shot through my thigh.
“What’s your favorite animal?” she asked, oblivious to everything outside the frame of the TV screen.
I snatched a few pills, not enough for Mark to notice but enough to last me a few more days. I leaned back. The pain in my leg faded.
Stacy said, “I’m working on a fox. A fennec fox.”
I pulled the sandwich bag from my pocket to add the new pills, and something cold brushed against my hand. It fell onto the couch.
“Hey.” The object drew Stacy’s attention away from the screen. “Is this for me?”
Long, pink entrails dangled from her fists as she lifted the thing up. The stringy guts were coated in blood and mucus, and it dripped into the cushion. Something round dangled from the bottom. White and blue. An eyeball.
Stacy placed the wet nerve over her head, around her throat. “How does it look?”
—can we fix this? Is there anyone we can look to? Or does the responsibility fall onto each of us. Alone—
She sat up straight, her boned knee stabbing deeper into my thigh, and the pain reset my vision.
It wasn’t an eyeball, not a real one. It was the nazar necklace Spit had given to me. The one Verona had lost. I yanked it from Stacy’s neck and tied it around my own.
The dead flower smell twisted into my nose and clung to the back of my throat. What day was it? Hot needles stabbed from my leg as I tried to sit up, and the nazar slid across the sweat beading up on my chest. The drugs were wearing off again.
—been injured? We think you have a chance! Give us—
Click.
—any answers surrounding the senseless murder of another young college student. Verona Miller was—
Click.
—Beauty. Perfume by Chienne.—
Click.
The sandwich bag crinkled as I pulled it from my pocket.
“Shit.” I flipped it upside down. A film of white powder coated the inside, but that was it. No more pills. Nothing. I licked the remaining residue while some junkie sitting on the floor next to me kept pressing his thumb into a remote.
—Mr. Miller is offering a ten-thousand dollar reward for the return of his—
Click.
—strawberry fusion energy. The only drink to—
Click.
—eat away at the lining of your intestines, causing acute bouts of—
Click.
—a memorial show. It will be hosted on campus at the end of the month—
The junkie nodded forward, before jerking back awake. Something crumpled beneath him. Tinfoil? A large square of it stuck out from between the carpet and his jeans. Burnt against one of the corners was something that looked like a toasted marshmallow.
—look no further. Welcome to your new home—
Click.
—Kurt Baker. He is wanted for questioning in a murder-suicide, where one young woman—
Click.
—can teach you a new language in days. Spanish? No problem! French? Easy!—
Click.
It was another pill, the marshmallow looking thing. Vicodin. Maybe Xanax. Someone had tried to smoke it off the aluminum. I reached over the carpet while the junkie continued flipping through channels. My entire arm shook, and a bolt of pain shot from my leg.
—don’t let these wind storms fool you. It’s still going to be hot, hot, hot out there. So remember—
Click.
—don’t start a fight you can’t win. Call us for all your animal control needs. When the bite is worse than the bark it isn’t worth—
Click.
—ten-thousand dollars? That’s quite the windfall for a couple of paintings. How does someone—
Click.
—break the cycle. Leave a mark. Bain Riche for all types of hair—
Click.
My fingers spread apart as I stretched my arm as far as it would go. The edge of the foil bounced against the tip of my finger, and the junkie was leaning forward again. Sweat rolled down my chest, collecting in the folds of my stomach, the smell of rotting flowers filled all the empty space in my head.
I gave one last push, enough to grab the aluminum and tear the corner free. The junkie jerked back awake as I pulled off the burnt pill and popped it in my mouth.
What day was it?
Some kid with a porcelain face, who I was sure I’d seen before but couldn’t remember where, sat on the floor in front of me. Wind rattled the windows of Mark’s house, and he was shoving a bag of white powder into his pocket.
A lot of white powder.
Enough to kill a horse.
“Yo, is that the guy?” The kid elbowed the person next to him. “He’s got the scar on his mouth.”
“I don’t know,” his friend said. “Kinda looks like you though.”
As the wind howled, the overhead lights dimmed and their wires buzzed as they struggled to keep the power running. Or maybe that was my head. Something flickered, and the kid with the perfect face stood up and walked over.
“Yo.” He kicked my foot. “You Kurt?”
My head rolled from one shoulder to the other, and he bent down to press his blank face into mine. “You know about those paintings, right? Wanna tell me where they are?” His breath smelled like it had crawled out of a garbage disposal, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
My eyes drifted to the lump of drugs in his pocket. My fingers twitched.
“Eh, I really don’t think it’s him,” his friend said, walking over to the both of us. “He’s hardly conscious anyways.”
The wind kept thrashing against the house, forcing the lightbulb above us to buzz louder. Burn brighter. It grew into a single high-pitched whir, ringing through my ears until it erupted into darkness. A power outage.
I went for the drugs.
My fingers brushed up against them, but the kid was too quick. His arms wrapped around mine, pinning me to his stomach, halfway off the floor. And even though my hand was twisted too far away to reach his pocket, I tried anyway.
Until something smacked my face.
“Fuck.” My voice whistled through my nose, and the kid let go of my wrist, letting me stumble back into the wall.
It tasted like dog sweat, the blood drooling from my nose, and a voice screamed from somewhere inside the dark house.
You ruin everything, Kurt!
Or maybe that was my head.
I coughed red onto my shirt, and the kid’s silhouette grew like a bear standing on its hind legs. I lunged. Shoulder first. It caught him right between his ribs, hard enough that we both stumbled over the coffee table. We went down, glass shattering beneath us.
You’re nothing! Nobody. You hear?
I straddle the kid, patting my hand against his jeans—feeling for the pocket with the drugs. And as soon as I found them, as soon as I got the bag between my fingers, the lights shot back on.
And his friend rammed me from the side
No wonder everyone wants to bust your face in.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” the friend asked, standing up over me.
The kid with the porcelain face got up and walked over to us, pushing his friend out of the way. As I went to crawl away, he stomped on my leg.
Hot pain shot up my spine, forcing the wind out of me, and I choked on air trying to breathe it back in.
Run away like you always do!
Instead of trying to keep crawling away, I rolled over. I rolled over so I could knock this kid, this baby-faced junkie, to the floor. My hands in fists, I climbed back on top of him.
I smashed his perfect face.
I landed blow after blow, ruining his soft cheeks, his round jaw. I kept punching until his yelling turned into gargling, and a Jimmy-sized bruise bloated over his check. Then slammed harder. I pummeled his shining eyes until they swelled up like Nathan’s corpse.
You left us all to die!
I wanted it gone, that face. Destroyed. A flattened cat on the side of the road. A coyote crushed beneath a billboard.
Roadkill.
Someone grabbed me by the collar. They pulled me back, lifting me away. My swings cut through empty air, and more people started grabbing me.
“Let me go,” I snarled, but the growing crowd took me further away, out of the living room, towards the front door.
“You’re diseased, man,” one of the people pushing me out said. It was Mike. “You gotta go, for real.”
The door squeaked open, and hot wind slapped my face.
I said, “I just wanted to fix it.”
“Sorry, dude,” Mike continued. “They’re just too far under your skin.”
He and the rest of the group pushed me out onto the porch, out of their home, and slammed the door shut. The lock clicked into place.
My fists were still clenched, shaking from how tight my fingernails were dug into my palm, and above me a light buzzed, struggling to stay on.
Did I still have it?
I held a fist up, fingers shaking as I peeled each one back. There it was. Wind rustled the crumpled plastic filled with powder. The bag of drugs. Enough to kill a horse.