“Well I do have a few more questions.”
“I’m sure you will find our website very helpful. Glad we could be of service today.” Mr. Gose hung up.
Frank almost called him right back. He even dialed the first three digits. But if he persisted who knows what Gose would think he was up to. Not that Frank could think of many uses for garbage that would warrant competition. Still that’s almost how Gose had suddenly treated him; like competition.
“It’s for my son’s fucking project.” Frank slammed the phone down. He calmed himself, started breathing exercises he’d been taught. It never really worked; all it did was let him brainstorm more devious ways to get revenge, even if he didn’t end up following through on any of his nasty ideas.
Frank laid back and tried to forget his worries. He wasn’t going into work today and thought he might never go again. He hadn’t made all the decisions he needed to make. His life just seemed strange. Not so much different but strange. Strange in that after everything that had happened, nothing had changed, he could keep living exactly the same. He was almost certain of it.
As evening approached a glare crept through the blinds and rested on his chest. The flickering life bounced up to his eyelids and he opened them.
He got up and stumbled with a half-asleep foot over to the window and peered out through the blinds. He could almost imagine his son playing in the street. Memories were always strong for Frank. He could almost add the cars that used to belong to the Watkins who had moved away two years ago.
His son stopped playing. Looked back at Frank and didn’t wave. Just stood there and stared.
Tony Gose still bugged Frank. And as a concerned citizen Frank felt he deserved to know what kind of money the city was making off of sending its trash off to various contractors. He had finally realized what one might make off of other people’s garbage and that’s identity theft. He was almost sure enough about it that he almost called his representative. But he didn’t want too many eyes looking through the garbage, not for a while anyway.
Instead, he went down to the City Hall and asked about the city’s trash presort. Of which no one could produce any evidence that the city profited off trash. There were no contracts and most conversations ended with, “I’ll have to get my supervisor to look into it but he’s on vacation this week.”
Something was fishy and of course Frank was aware he looked like a madman getting upset that no one had the information he was looking for, who could care? The city had very low pollution for being an asphalt jungle.
He tried to move on with his life, but his life would be strange until it ended so he stalked the dumping stations and saw nothing happen. Trash came in and it never came out. Not during the hours he checked. He even checked to see if it had been dumped during some of the hours he had decided to head home. But he could still see some memorable pieces of junk several days later just buried a bit deeper.
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A week went by and he waited for his garbage man again. This time he had more trouble asking the man a question. He had to chase him down to two other driveways.
“Look what is it? I’ve got a job to do here.”
“Sorry,” Frank lied. “With all this research I got to thinking about writing a mystery novel. Have you guys ever found a dead body in the trash?”
“In the trash? No.”
“How do you know a body doesn’t go through?”
The man shook his head and gave a disgusted laugh. “We’d know. Didn’t you read your contract with the city for pick up, no biological waste!” The man lost his smile and looked Frank over as if he was trying to decide if Frank was capable of murder. He must not have because he jumped back on the side of the truck and waved his driver on down to the next house.
Frank had been a child scientist. He had experimented with everything he could get his hands on. He found a toy chemistry set to be too pedestrian and turned to dismantling radios and squirrels. That day he came up with a new experiment.
The next time Frank checked a dumping station that trash was gone, picked up. Very little graced the bottom of the large dumpsters. He laughed at his new hobby and even shook his head at how strange he must be acting.
But his experiment was ready the next time the trash guys came. This time he perched himself on his porch and watched the garbage truck pick up a bag he had placed in a can three houses before his own. He watched and made sure they took it and put it in without any concern.
What the garbage man did not know was that it was a bag of dead squirrels he’d trapped and killed.
Frank waited until the garbage truck finished its round on his street. Then, he hopped in his car and stalked the truck for the rest of its route, which finished up just after 11 A.M. at which point the truck went to a dumping station and disposed the trash they had collected.
No concerns, no suspicions that something was wrong in that bag of trash, it went in and was left alone. Frank brought a camcorder this time and set it up to record the dump when he knew he couldn’t be there. It meant that Frank would have to check the camera every three hours. That was plenty of time to work in a nap and a meal and a shower and anything else he should be doing.
It was three days before the trash disappeared again.
Somehow he’d missed it.
Frank had been consistent in rewinding the tape when nothing had happened and pressing record again when he left. But here the dumpsters were empty as if it had just happened moments before he arrived to check on the camera. He searched the tape back and forth and saw nothing. No trucks, no people, no trash magically floating through the air, not even a flying saucer. The trash had simply disappeared. He physically checked the dumpsters every three hours; clipboard and pen in hand.
He knew the trash should still be there. He searched the dumpster in case there was a secret door or tunnel or tube that sucked all the trash out. It was five in the morning and he didn’t have much time before the attendant would arrive with his coffee and donuts and go back to sleep in the little shack at the entrance.
He climbed into the large dumpster, certain the magician’s trick could be solved within. His son had always liked magic and the main part to any magic trick was misdirection.
Frank’s feet slammed down on the metal floor and echoed probably halfway down to city hall. He crept along the walls with his flashlight looking for some way the trash could go out. The walls at first just appeared to be scratched from garbage being tossed in and emptied out for years and years, but that wasn’t what Frank saw now.
It could’ve been teenagers but it looked more deliberate than that. The scratches that lined the dumpster walls were more like symbols. A pentagram was elegantly detailed on either end of the dumpster and more symbols Frank had never seen lined the long walls as if they were telling some kind of story.
He blamed the teenagers again.
It was their fault what happened to his son, wasn’t it?
Frank’s voice worked inside his head like his soccer coach from High School telling him whatever he needed to hear. But Frank was too stubborn then and he was too stubborn now.
“It wasn’t them. It was me.” Frank stared at the empty dumpster and wondered if a tear would drop from his eyes. But nothing happened. He just watched his flashlight’s beam bouncing on the metal until he gave up.
He had no more tears.
That was strange too.
All his life Frank had cried easy. He had a sensitive nose and the right brush with it teared him up like a little girl. Now nothing could, not even the death of his wife and only son.
He found himself finally admitting it in his head.
“Just like the world is round,” he said to his flashlight, “they are dead.”
Then there was the strangest sound. His eyes jerked up with his flashlight and the beam reflected two-dozen eyeballs. The fear hit him so fast that he didn’t move and during that paralysis he was able to the fear move past him and realize he had merely found himself wit
h an audience of squirrels.
“Come to laugh at me?” He attacked them with the flashlight, but it didn’t seem to bother their vision and the squirrels just sat on the edge of the dumpster and peered in at him.
Then Frank noticed the dried blood around most this necks and stomachs. It was too specific not to be a coincidence.
These were the squirrels Frank had captured and killed for his experiment.
Frank looked at the symbols carved into the walls of the dumpster and he let them join the round earth as fact.
They were symbols that brought back the dead. And here was Frank’s experiment staring back at him wondering if he was pleased with the result. In moment he would be, but before that he was maddeningly giddy and violent as his body sought to reach out and grasp facts and bend the universe to make sense the way it used to.
But what was the point?
He threw his arms away from his shoulders just to see them dangle at his sides, his breath was heavy like his brow and finally he forced a smile for his next experiment.
Tomorrow night was too long to wait, but the sun would soon be rising to greet the lazy attendant and Frank would not want to be caught discovering the trash collection’s secret. Somehow the trash vanished, and somehow life was returned. They had warned him, hadn’t they, nothing biological!
“The selfish bastards,” he cursed. “I’ll be back.” He told the squirrels and scampered back out of the dumpster and through the woods to his truck. He had to go to the hardware store and stock up on quality digging equipment.
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Once the darkness had come again, Frank dug. The voice of his old soccer coach joined him and told him to, “Keep pushing it! Don’t give up! This is what all the practice has been about.” All the practice as a kid digging graves for his science experiments, all the practice putting up fence posts around his house so that his kid wouldn’t run out and play in the street and get hit by a car. But a car can travel through fence posts. Frank knew that like he knew the Earth was round.
Frank hated the things he knew, but tonight he could change that. What did he know that couldn’t be disproven?
Frank learned a great deal that night about his muscles, caskets, and month old corpses. The kind of things that would normally convince a man as lazy as he to never pick up a shovel again, but as he drove his son under the moonlight to the dump he promised he would do it again and again. Every time, he promised.
The trash men had come and dumped a new load of garbage. Frank was delighted to see it and in the cover of night he crawled into the dumpster with his son’s body and built him a nest. Then he built support for any more trash they might throw on top of him and risk crushing his body anymore.
He kissed the putrid flesh and held his son’s body for what seemed like not long enough. But he didn’t know what would happen if he stayed in the dumpster when it worked its magic.
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Frank’s son stood before him undead; a recycled body, a recycled soul. But neither was what his son had been. There was the smell of all the embalming fluids that leaked from his skin. His eyelids were sewn shut and the poor boys face fought to open them, just like his lips. Frank watched in horror as the lips ripped and agony swelled on his son’s face.
“Charlie, it’s me. It’s your father. You’re home again.” He whispered to the undead boy.
Frank wrapped his son in the blanket he’d thought to bring and shuttled the stumbling corpse to his truck, “we’re going home now, Charlie.”
THE END.
A FINAL CALL TO OURSELVES by Bob McNeil
“No wonder I am never alone on a Saturday night.” Olivia Hart, an exotic dancer, said to herself while staring at her wet and naked body in a full-length bedroom mirror. To better see herself, she wiped some dust off the reflective surface. Her hazel eyes panned her 67-25-36 body. She ran her hand thru her corn-colored, shoulder length hair and admired her face that reminded people of a young Mamie Van Doren.
“Still hot and alive at twenty five,” Olivia thought as she picked up a towel on the doorknob of her closet. Rivaling only Narcissus, Olivia loved looking at herself.
Quite aware that she was late for her date with a lawyer named Thomas Coventry, Olivia took her time and drank a lot of Moët & Chandon champagne. No different than the other men on her list that exceeded the length of 432 Park Avenue, Tom had to wait for his peep at her pulchritudinous presence. Again, same as the other men, he was average, average features and average height. Even his obsession with Olivia was average. That preoccupation came with a price tag and Olivia made him provide for everything, including her rent, car payments, clothing bills, pedicures, manicures, and trips to the hairstylist. As far as she was concerned, it was what beautiful women did to men, average or otherwise.
Later, fully clothed in a plus-size Marilyn Halter Dress and clear platform heels, Olivia walked to her front door. She was not home often; therefore, the place was a mess of dirty dishes, food stains, takeout menus, and an empty refrigerator. Leaving her one bedroom apartment in Queens, New York, Olivia prepared to race over to Godiva’s Grove, Manhattan’s trendiest club. Although her date offered to either drive her or have a car service pick her up, she insisted on driving herself.
That spring evening, at eleven twenty-three p.m., Olivia entered the elevator of her seven-storey building and headed to the garage. All the while, she was doing what she enjoyed a lot—texting. Those thumbs communicated with her date, some girlfriends and various blogs. They received her misspelled pithy comments with Smartphone’s emoticons. When she phoned people, she would ask them to text her and hang up. A pot, a pan or a man never received the amount of touches that Olivia’s phone got. Men, those who dated her, envied her phone. It received the tactile attention they craved. Never at a loss for a phrase to post, her output surpassed most journalists. Nevertheless, the comments had the insightfulness of cotton candy’s nutritional value.
Previous to pulling out in her purple Corvette Stingray, Olivia stopped texting long enough to guzzle champagne again. Enjoying her ever-increasing inebriation, she decided to celebrate her love of herself with another glance at her favorite person—herself. Regardless of her booze-addled state, possessing great care, Olivia had no problem applying some lipstick. Throughout the process of improving her appearance, she just wished her life could afford her the luxury of not working. She craved a life of texting and looking at the greatness of herself. Sure, she would treat some man to the glory of her presence if he served her financial needs. Moreover, he had to serve her emotional need for adoration. Above anything else, the woman wanted the adoration that she did not receive in a halfway house. Such adoration was denied Olivia when her drug-dazed parents abandoned her at age six. A desire to cry was drowned under her champagne.
Achieving a speed that would better serve a racecar driver, Olivia zoomed out of the parking lot and headed for the streets. Within the seconds it took her to leave the garage and pick up her Smartphone for another text, Olivia hit someone or something. First, unaware of what happened, the driver assumed it was a pothole. The victim’s cry made Olivia realize her error.
Movements toward the front of the car were wrought with trepidation. Fearing the gruesomeness of the collision, Olivia held the lids her eyes down. Upon mustering the fortitude to view the injured party, Olivia opened her eyes. There, beneath the fender, a dark-skinned old woman with a grey afro was sprawled out in pain. Both short and Rubenesque, the geriatric female was around sixty or seventy years of age. Conflicted, Olivia expressed compassion for the victim, but she wanted an express lane to her date.
Just with her gesticulation, the matronly figure told Olivia to crouch down and come closer. Hesitant, but compliant, Olivia knelt towards the injured individual. It was then, with the grip of a handcuff, the older lady seized Olivia’s arm. Embarrassed, Olivia looked ‘round for witnesses. She was relieved to find none.
“Too long, too long have the Tanzanian Titans, Hypatians, The Ann Hibbins�
� Society, and other Witches ignored the 1.6 million crashes caused by you texters. I, against my Coven’s wishes, will use what’s left of my aging powers to scour your kind off the Earth. You’re sediment on a pan in need of cleansing. I, Tituba from the Salem, shall cleanse life of you.
“Our empathic link is complete. Alas, I now know you, child. Over a decade ago, before your family discarded you, your soul was a peach. You must return to that state. Vanity, itinerant as germs, crawled through the media, fads and social networks, then made mold turn you into something rotten. Stripped of yourself, I cast you into the thing that you care for above self-aggrandizement, human beings, and even money, that damnable phone. Unwittingly, you grasp that device, but, in fact, it seizes you. It takes your ability to imagine and intellectualize. So, tonight, this incantation shall imprison you in this mesmerizing mechanism dubbed a Smartphone. Until you can convince someone to live a proper existence sans using their phalanges to thumb up artificial intelligence, your soul shall remain in that machine.”
Pained by the grasp, Olivia wanted an incantation that could get her far away. Unintelligible utterances erupted. Tituba’s plosives, dentals, sibilants, nasals, fricatives and gutturals seemed to be glossolalia. But, whatever the witch was saying had a thaumaturgical effect. A pervasive fog surrounded them. Olivia’s heart pounded at a hummingbird’s speed and a marathon runner’s amount of perspiration poured. Far surpassing Olivia’s worst phobias, she saw her flesh fade as if she were a pasty smudge on a car window being wiped away. Abduction from some paranormal force caused panic in Olivia. Muted in the absence of corporeal substance, Olivia could not cry over her anguished situation.
Wherever Olivia wound up, she did not recognize it. Outside of that, her body felt strange. From what she could tell, her whole mass had no appendages. Unable to explain it, but she felt an electric current in a box. Equivalent to pins and needles or static shock, the woman knew she was something different. Olivia considered her situation and the voltaic anxiety increased.
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