Subject: Re: Your Waste
Dear Julie,
I think I figured out why you’re not responding. It would be too embarrassing for you to admit, which is why I’m not going to spell it out here. But rest assured—you’re still the only Julie, the most beautiful Julie, in my eyes.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Your Waste
Julie,
Back in pre–Asphodel Tank days, the ReJuve was programmed to knock out wastes’ brain waves, leaving them just there enough to walk and follow orders. They did this so we wouldn’t have to chuck them one by one into the incinerator. They’d march right in, so long as we used a friendly tone.
During training, a doctor showed us two brain scans—the one on the left was all lit up, and the one on the right was almost totally dark, except for a few spots of color on each side. See how the right scan is all dark, the doctor said. That’s what makes them waste. There’s almost nothing there.
Another trainee raised his hand. But they still move and everything, he said. They still listen and talk. He cleared his throat and asked if they can’t feel.
The doctor was ready for this question. Not in the same way you and I do, he said. When you’re falling in a dream, you think there’s momentum, you think the ground is getting closer and closer until finally you wake up with a start. Notice how you never landed. That’s how they feel—like they’re in a dream.
The trainee didn’t like that answer much. He said, but they’re still hysterical, aren’t they, they’re still the ladies they were before. Before is the operative word, said the doctor, annoyed. They’re the ladies whose pain, because it was not visible to clinicians, wasn’t taken seriously. The ReJuve system takes women’s pain away, takes their pain seriously. Do you want it to be like the old days with hysterical women walking around in society, no one willing to listen or able to help? The doctor practically recited the answer. He probably got the question in every meeting with suits.
Until some suits got sentimental the way Randy did and demanded the Asphodel knock waste out cold. Before that, we talked about waste being dream-dark. This one’s so dream-dark, I’d say. It’ll barely move its feet. It’s cutting into my lunch hour.
Your waste was dream-dark from the moment Randy and I saw her, to when she was riding in the truck, to when she was sitting like a statue in my living room, blinking and confused but still as a statue, holding your brush in her lap. She fell asleep around eleven, so I carried her to bed and tucked her in, and I was passed out on the couch when the lights flicked on. She was standing there in front of the TV, which was still on and playing infomercials for miracle shampoo, and her face was different, not calm and wide-eyed like a dream-dark waste’s face should be. She stood straight, with that practiced posture you have, still except for her hands over her belly, grabbing at the air, like she had a bad stomachache. She was worried and lucid, and she asked me, in a scratchy voice, what time it was, and whether or not I was going to end it all.
Anyway, if you could come over and convince her that I didn’t kidnap her and I’m not going to hurt her, that would be great. If she’s as stubborn as you, you might be the only person in the whole world she’ll listen to.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Your Waste
Julie,
I really was going to take her in today. I had it written down, “Bring in Frankie,” in the personal planner you bought me for Christmas. I’ll admit it’s the first time I’ve used it, but that was the only thing written on the page, so I knew I wouldn’t have an excuse for forgetting.
We sort of had a fight last night. That sounds worse than it is. What I mean is, your waste wanted to leave, and I obviously couldn’t let that happen, and so when she went for the door I grabbed her around the waist, and she punched me, but it was like being hit with little pillows, it was like nothing. I barricaded her in my bedroom, and she banged on the door all night, and when she stopped I wasn’t sure if she’d just tired out or finally deactivated. But I opened the door and her hands were scraped raw, but there wasn’t any blood, and I wondered if she had any blood, and then I realized that was a silly thing to wonder. She was crying and sitting on the ground. When I walked in, she lunged forward, and I tried to step out of the way, but she grabbed my leg, and I started to shake her off, but she just held tighter, and I noticed she wasn’t trying to claw me with her nails (your biotin-strong nails), but she was hugging me, and trying to speak, but she couldn’t make any words that made sense.
Remember last year, when we sat in the ER for six hours? When you were reeling, and they told you to rate the pain out of ten and you said it was an eleven? I told the doctor you don’t act like that, not unless it’s serious, but he just shrugged, asked if you were regularly hysterical, asked if it was cramps. It took them until the next morning to figure out you had an ovarian cyst. You’d been anti-ReJuve before that, asked me to quit my job and find something honest, but on the car ride home you asked me how much those ReJuve things cost anyway. I reminded you what you’d always said about those “Barbie machines,” and you didn’t say anything, but you gave me a look that made me feel like I’d been shot out of your solar system and I’d do anything to crawl back into it. When I opened the door, the look on her face was just like that.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your Waste
I think she’s fading on her own.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your Waste
Julie,
I keep thinking about how Randy said she shouldn’t be cold in the end, and how we made each other promise that we wouldn’t let the other die in a home or a hospital, and I think it’d be wrong to let her die in an incinerator. So right now she’s bundled up in every blanket I own and she has tea (your fancy loose-leaf tea), but she hasn’t drunk any yet.
Let me know if you want to see her. I have no idea how much longer she’ll be around.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your Waste
Dear Julie,
She’s making words! I really thought the Asphodel Tank had knocked her out, that she’d just have dream-feeling and that’s why she’d only ever babble and ask what time it is. I’d gotten used to telling her the time every few minutes, just so she wouldn’t get all nervous and worried and riled up, and when I told her it was almost 2:30, she rolled her eyes and said I can read, and I thought I’ve never been so happy to hear your cruel voice.
I keep asking her if she wants food or water or anything, but she turns me down. She asks for tea, but she doesn’t drink it, just holds it in her hands, in the middle of her blanket nest like an egg. She leans over to put her face in the steam. Once, I asked her if she wanted to take a shower, and she turned around so fast she spilled her tea, and she glared at me and told me I could shower by myself before turning back around to watch Green Acres, and I was so surprised I couldn’t even correct her.
Before you ask—I haven’t even tried to touch her.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your Waste
Dear Julie,
Okay, I did try to hold her hand, while we were watching TV on Sunday. She had both hands cupping her big mug of tea, as usual. Her right hand held the handle, but her left hand was a little looser on the side of the mug. I slipped two fingers between her left palm and the edge of the mug, which was crazy hot because the tea was fresh. Her hands had to have been burning. She didn’t react. I waited for her to squeeze back, to push me away, to do anything, but all I got was nothing. The mug was too damn hot, so I had to pull away. I told her that’s too hot, and she said I want it hot, I want to feel it. Her hands were pink, her palms red. Her face was white as a sheet, getting whiter as
the day went on.
When I first saw her, and I picked her up out of the Asphodel Tank, I knew she was waste. I also felt that your soul was somehow still in her, that the ReJuve hadn’t worked the way it was meant to. I even thought, What if this is the real Julie and the ReJuvenated one, the one that’s walking around not in pain anymore, hasn’t got a soul at all? It’s silly, but it was real, it was in my bones, the feeling that she was real somehow, that at the very least this pain was making her real. That she wasn’t you, but in some ways she was more you than whatever the ReJuve spit out when you used it.
She was fading, that much was clear. Even with all the blankets in the house, she was shivering. All she wanted to do was watch TV and sleep, but even when she was glued to the screen I could flip between channels and she wouldn’t react, didn’t seem to notice if we were watching a gory horror movie or the evening news. Normally, you would make a joke about not being able to tell the difference between the two. She would blink.
I didn’t have much time, so I asked her the question that had been burning in my chest all weekend—why you hadn’t responded to my emails about the hairbrush.
She was more lucid in that moment than she had been in a while, and she wasn’t as real as you, but she was somehow more real than you’d ever been to me. She talked like every word was important.
She told me her heart was acting up on Thursday night, that she had been cleaning the bathroom for the third time that week to try to make the nerves go away but they wouldn’t leave, and I knew she had bad nerves, and she had already gone for a four-mile run and that usually helped to tire her out, and her heart rate had risen at the peak of her run but had yet to fall, and so she came home and drank a gallon of milk and started cleaning the bathroom and nothing was helping, and she realized the milk she’d drunk was my old whole milk, the stuff I’d used to bulk up and that it would make her fat, that she couldn’t run it off because she’d already gone for a run that day, and all she wanted to do was take a shower in her clean bathroom but she couldn’t find her nice brush she used when her hair was wet, and then she saw my emails about it being at my house, and she knew in that moment that she’d either have to use her ReJuve for the third day in a row or slit her wrists on the kitchen floor, because nothing would make it stop except getting out of her body. I knew she had a bad heart.
We watched a whole episode of Hogan’s Heroes before I said anything. Then I told her she could have just come over to my place and gotten the hairbrush and taken the shower. She laughed, the sound like chimes, and I felt like a fool for thinking this had anything to do with me, and I felt like your soul was gone.
I’m taking her in tomorrow. I’ll drop the hairbrush in your mailbox on my way home from work.
Sean Rasmussen
Biowaste Management
Subject: Frankie
Julie,
Don’t worry, we haven’t found another piece of live waste kicking around in your Asphodel Tank. And Frankie is gone. But now that Randy is your biowaste guy, I thought you should be aware of an incident I had with him last week.
I was getting ready to bring your waste in early, but it was below zero, so I went to start the car and let it warm up. I was scraping my windshield, reaching over to the middle where it’s hard to reach, where you always made me scrape for you because stretching your arms out straight like that makes your coat slide up past your belly and your stomach touch the snow on the hood of your car. And it was biting cold, cold enough that I was too occupied to see Randy until he was right in front of me, standing with a baseball bat in his hand. I said what’s that for, and he said it’s to take care of the Frankenstein you’ve been harboring. Keep in mind, I hadn’t told him squat about your waste. So I played it cool, said what are you talking about, and he said he still hadn’t gotten his flannel back, that I hadn’t even mentioned it, and he knew something was wrong, and he came by last night to ask for it back and saw me playing house with a monster.
I remembered the way she was at the end, how she woke up that morning and said I have to go now, and I said that’s right, and she just said all right, let’s get it over with.
I thought, boy that was strange, but to Randy I just said don’t call her that. I told Randy she’ll be dead in a few hours, and this broke him just a little, just enough to make him drop the act, and he said she’s hysterical, she’s just been in pain this whole time and I’m damn selfish for prolonging that. I said it’s not like you to come over swinging a bat, what were you planning to do with it, and he sort of hunched over and said you ever see a hysterical woman, and I said I dated one for a year and her corpse for a weekend, and he said no I mean really hurting, doctor says it’s true and everything. I said just once, when Julie had a cyst, and he said it’s the hardest thing in the world, seeing your woman hurt and not being able to do anything about it, and I said the only thing harder has got to be living like that.
Then he got angry again and said you’re crazy, you could lose your job over this, I ought to report you, and I said I know, and he said she’s not really Julie, the real Julie is long gone, and I said I know, she won’t answer any of my emails. He didn’t have much to say after that.
I offered him a ride and he said okay, and we piled into my car, which was warm by then, with Frankie in it. Frankie is what Randy called her right after she walked into the incinerator. He said Frankie had bad nerves just like Julie. You could see her shaking like a leaf right up until the end.
Mackenzie McGee is a writer and poet. She is the recipient of a Walton Family Fellowship in fiction and a Lily Peter Fellowship in poetry. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, where she is at work on her first novel. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, the poet Landon McGee.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Here at adda magazine, whenever possible, we try to select pieces through themed open calls, taking on readers (often in various languages) and editors from around the world to help us out. All our submissions are read anonymously. Very occasionally we do offer special commissions to established writers; but, generally, we find open calls—ones free to enter—are the best way to find new voices and we’re always delighted to learn a selected writer has never published before, such as in this case.
Mathapelo’s powerful story came to us through an open call on climate change. From close to seven hundred entries, hers was one of only twenty selected. It was immediately apparent that she’d convincingly made, over the span of just a few pages, a small world of its own, a window into a world, in the way of all stories that stay with you.
JS Tennant, Editor
adda
THE STRONG-STRONG WINDS
Mathapelo Mofokeng
IN THE KITCHEN sits a cooler box. In it, a Fanta. The Fanta in the cooler box is not mine. Neither is it my grandmother Nkhono’s.
It belongs to my father, Nkhono’s fourth son. And today we will pour it over his grave to quench his thirst.
We were meant to visit him yesterday, but Nkhono said the weather wasn’t good and the winds were too strong. I think she meant he’d enjoy it more on a boiling hot day like today.
It’s always the same at Avalon Cemetery: the red sand, the unkempt weeds that Nkhono concerns herself with, the drinking fountain that promises no water, and the lump that sits in my throat. The walk is always quiet. Only the steady thud of the bag of Fanta bumping against my leg. The steady thud reminding me to snap out of it.
Plot A–H
“Surely something like this couldn’t beat me,” Nkhono says, her hand gesturing to a modest tombstone.
Nkhono hasn’t been able to erect a tombstone for my father.
“It was never meant to be this way,” she reminds me as we walk past the more elaborate tombstones. “He was meant to bury me.”
Once God grants Nkhono some money, from the scratch card competitions, the lottery, or horse racing betting, I know she’ll erect something decent for my father. For now, the rough plank above his grave will do.
/> It’s always the same at Avalon, except today the cemetery is littered.
“It’s the strong winds that yesterday brought,” Nkhono says, as the gravediggers pick up the cigarette butts, beverage bottles, dirty diapers, food wrappers, and other litter with their shovels.
I’d rather the strong winds with their litter, I think. They’re better than the strong-strong winds, which leave you picking up the pieces of your life.
We’ve had some of these strong-strong winds. So strong they destroyed the power line in our neighborhood. This is how our fridge stopped working. This is why we borrowed a cooler box. This is why a cooler box sits in the kitchen.
Plot I–M
Nkhono always insists on taking a water break at the drinking fountain that promises no water. It’s also here where she eats her boiled eggs before taking her afternoon pills. The blue one for her bones, the yellow for her sugar, and the heart-shaped for her high blood pressure.
Nkhono says her sugar started during Mandela’s presidency.
“Soon after his release,” she’d say, “several trucks carrying bricks entered our townships, and after these more trucks arrived carrying sugar to stock the shopping malls that the bricks had built.” But my aunt, Nkhono’s firstborn, who tells me things young people shouldn’t know, once told me that Nkhono’s sugar started when Nkhono was pregnant with my father. Pregnancy-induced diabetes is how my aunt referred to it.
Nkhono offers me a sip of water before packing the bottle away. I decline because I have watched her mouth cover the entire edge of the bottle as she drank down her pills, and I cannot unsee what I have seen.
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