Sandy brayed.
“That’s right, girl. Same as we tossed Mother.”
A slow, bumpy ride home and it was time to unload. West coaxed Sandy backward toward the edge of the pit. The wagon wheels creaked. Closer. Sandy’s legs quivered. She snorted and collapsed. West jumped from the wagon and knelt by her side. The mule’s jaw cringed tightly and closed. She was dead.
“I loves my poor old brute. Poor, poor Sandy,” West said and began to cry into her friend’s brown, sweaty fur.
She struggled for over an hour to unhitch her friend and winch her fat body to the edge of the pit, but it only took a second for Sandy to land. The echoing thump stunned West like a punch in the face. Memories of her mother rushed into her mind, cold pinching of regret.
The heavens darkened as she rolled back her tarp and pulled on her gloves. She flung one scoop of rubbish at a time into the empty air, not caring what precious goodies may be hidden in the waste. Half-eaten loaves of bread. Ancient relics. She tossed them all. Not the way her father taught her to unload the cart, but so what. His prickly smile was gone for—she shivered and looked down.
The trash she held would bury her friend, and Sandy would be lost forever. West’s fingers opened and the remains slipped through and landed in the cart. She jumped down, bumped her way inside the shack, and lit a lantern. Then she flopped onto the late king’s rickety rocker and closed her eyes. Her life was over. How could she haul trash for the queen without Sandy?
A coyote yelped. They frequented the area, drawn by the enticing aroma of the pit. Again—a weird, hollow vibration in the air. Tinkling glass outside, rattling cans. West remembered she had only unloaded half of the cart. Coyotes had to be feasting on the remainder. The mess would be dreadful.
“Ain’t in no mood for them thieves,” she said and pushed herself up from the rocker.
West grabbed some rocks from her stash, picked up her light, and eased open the door. She crept around the side of her shack, her shadow hunched and wide on the rustic plank walls. Nothing around the cart. All was silent, save for the feathery rustle of leaves on nearby trees and a cricket that chirped with an eerie lust.
Had she been mistaken about the noise (the remaining trash did not look disturbed)? She wiped her hands on her pants and eyed the darkness. Sandy was all she had left, and now her friend lay in the pit.
West walked over to her rock and sat, legs dangling below her, the lantern at her side, warming her arm. She had known this day would come. Tears ran down her face as the life she was born into rekindled before her eyes—heavy wagon wheels grinding down ruts in the Esbenshade road, bitter drafts of rotting air in the summer, followed by miles of crackly leaves and frosted trees in the fall, shovel after shovel of trash disappearing into that sulfury darkness of the pit, the sour stench of liquor oozing from her father’s overalls as she scrubbed them in the battered pail.
“Why?” she called down into the chasm, and it seemed to yawn and grow at the sound of her voice, a deepening blackness. Those familiar moans rose in volume—grinding, grating. Hungry growls.
“Take me back, pit. Take me back to the day before.”
The pit sucked down the trash slinger’s tears and dried them into dust. If only her mother had not died so young. If only Sandy could have lived forever.
A wail from out in the darkness—West jumped.
“Who’s there?”
The wail grew louder, drowning out the moans.
“Stupid coyotes never learn.” Every time one fell in, the pit consumed the beast by morning.
West stood and held out the lantern. A distant eye glared back from below, a touch different from the yellow glare of a coyote’s. That was Sandy’s eye, Sandy’s dead eye. The coyote must be out of range of her light.
“Hole needs ta eat, dog, and better it be your bony ass than mine,” she called down.
And below, Sandy brayed—West jumped and spun around. No one was there.
Sandy brayed again and a jolt of fear weakened her legs.
It’s not real, West thought. That old girl’s memory be too strong for me, that’s all.
She sank to her knees, her brain twisting in confusion. “Yonder pit has many and sharp teeth, and when she grows hungry, she eats at yer mind,” her father repeated for the millionth time.
“Garbage men are the slop in the back of the cart, gal.” The words stung. They came from her father, from deep in the pit. They dragged along a vision of the past.
West was a small girl. She knelt, cowering against the wagon wheel as her father towered over her. She stared up at Melvin’s mangy beard as his greasy face blotted out the sun above. He promised West could ride along with him to work. Instead, Melvin spit a sickening wad of tobacco at his daughter.
“You don’t want this job, gal. Slop in the back of the cart, that’s all you’ll end—”
West ran from her father. Melvin jumped down and chased her, tackled her, spit in her face.
“Jump in with the maggots, gal . . . must feed the—”
“No!” she shouted, and the pit recoiled at her rebuke.
Silence.
Then Sandy brayed once more, a shrill, echoing blast. She was alive! West was certain her friend was alive and had not been dead when she pushed her in. A gladness awakened in her heart, a bonfire of warmth no wad of tobacco juice could quench.
“Sandy! You wait, girl. I’ll get you out. I’ll . . . ”
West wiped her hands on her shirt, licked her lips, and spit. Nothing ever survived the pit. Sandy would be eaten up like that coyote before the sun— West ran inside her shack as a light murmur filtered up from below. She was back in seconds with a coil of rope, and the lantern went down. Sandy’s eyes glowed bright.
“Sandy! It’s okay, girl!”
The mule lay stuck on her side. Her chest rose and fell, front hoofs kicking the trash around as she struggled for traction. West found a sturdy place to rest the lantern. Then she sat and rubbed her eyes and listened to the grating moans as they rose in volume. Grinding, crunching, the pit feasted. How long would it take? How much time did she have?
The hell critters were real, though they always remained hidden. They were the hungry ones. They were the teeth and the guts of the pit. She placed a rock on the end of the rope, then climbed up into her cart. The remaining trash was light. She heaved it into the pit like mad, most of it landing far out beyond Sandy and the mound she rested on.
Gotta fill the bastard, make her level rise. West pictured Sandy shaking off the trash and stepping up closer to safety with each layer she slung in.
When the cart stood empty, West saw she had failed. She sat and rubbed her grimy hands together while a voice in her mind scolded her for going too near the edge.
“Sandy fell in the pit, Ma. Don’t worry, I’ll go down and get her.”
West leaped from her cart. She pulled the end of the rope out from beneath the rock and tied it to a solid part of her shack. Then she lowered herself into the pit.
Her feet touched the trash. She let go of the rope and untied the lantern. Then she clenched her shaky hands into fists and staggered toward the shape of her friend.
“I’m coming, Sa—”
A hole. Her foot slipped down. She pulled back. It was stuck.
A voice from below: “Just like yer old man, gal. Nothing but—”
West pulled free and leaped over to Sandy. She fell to her knees by her friend’s side.
“It’s all right, darlin’, I’m here for ya.”
She held out the lantern and touched Sandy’s neck. She did not move. Her eye was glossy and dull in the light. West stared. Sandy was dead.
The pit rumbled beneath them as though the hell critters had grown impatient to reach the surface of the trash. Fresh meat above, the little bastards thought.
A humming sound. A haunting melody buried be
neath many layers of trash. West turned. Slanted in the outermost fingerlings of her light, a pale form motioned to her from across the gloom.
“Mother!”
Was it really her?
West pushed herself up and ran toward the figment, abandoning Sandy, her sweetest friend in the realm. She stopped as a dozen sets of eyes appeared behind her mother. Fiery green—hell critters? Demons?
Her mother stepped toward her, lurching into the beam of light. Her mouth opened to speak, but only a ragged hiss escaped her lips. Fitting. Even in death her voice belonged to the queen.
“Can you hear me?” West asked.
Her mother fell to her knees and held out her hand. A ring glinted in her palm. She moaned. West ignored the green eyes behind her mother and stepped closer. She snatched the ring from her bony fingers and held it into the light. Heavy and gold, littered with diamonds.
“Where did—”
Her mother jerked to the side and fell. A dark shape dragged her back into the shadowy rubbish. Hissing growls, claws scraping on rusty tin. The drunk laughter of a father she remembered all too well. West stared in awe as the shadows twisted and darkened amidst the debris, and her mother disappeared.
More eyes—an army of green dots appeared low to the ground. She slipped and regained her footing, the junk beneath her feet shifting and sinking. West shoved the ring onto her finger and ran for the rope.
She pulled herself up as the hell critters hissed and moaned below her.
“Goodbye, Mother,” she whispered. “Goodbye, Sandy.” The breeze lifted her whispers toward the sky, away from the foul darkness and muck of the pit.
West heaved herself up onto her rock and flopped over on her back. She rubbed the ring on her finger, savoring the grating moans that vibrated up from the darkness below.
Consumers
Gary A. Braunbeck
Our penultimate offering marks Gary Braunbeck’s third appearance in this series, and this time he gives us something atypical of his work. Instead of his trademark examinations of the human heart in his longer fiction, he reveals a rarely seen caustic and satiric side to his writing.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store there’s an old fellow who greets you when you come through the doors. His uniform is blue and well pressed, his shoes shiny, his white hair glowing under the overhead lights, his voice tattered at the edges (he is, after all, an old fellow, and perhaps he drank or smoked too much in his younger days), and he smiles at you as if someone has just stuck a gun in his back and told him to act naturally.
“Welcome,” he says. “Thank you for shopping with us. If you need any help, please don’t be afraid to ask.” It doesn’t matter a damn that you have just entered the store and have yet to buy anything; this is the way he greets everyone, with those memorized words and his gun-in-the-back smile. Were you to stop long enough and look in his eyes, you might see behind them something that is nailed down and in torment, even fear and horror, like a drowning victim too far from the shore who can do nothing more than wave their arms and cry out in futile hope that someone will hear them and they will be rescued.
“Don’t forget to grab one of our flyers and check out today’s sales,” he says, his voice an offshore echo as the customers walk away.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store there is always a sale going on, always a blue/green/orange special in one aisle or another. Perhaps it’s one of these brightly lit sales that the woman is hurrying to, carrying her toddler. She barely glances at the greeter as she makes her way to the shopping-cart rack and, after a brief struggle, frees one from the corral. Her toddler—and a cute little one he is, perhaps eleven months at most—giggles and grabs at her with his tiny arms as she places him in the upper seat, as if it’s some kind of game they’ve played a thousand times but to him never gets old.
After that, it’s on to the back of the store, near the Hardware and Home Repair area where no customers are elbowing their way past others to get to a sales item. The woman parks the cart next to the Motor Oil section, glancing around to make certain no one can see her. After a few moments she opens her purse and pulls out a small but well-used stuffed toy, an elephant missing one of its tusks, and gives it to the toddler, who excitedly snatches it from her hand and hugs it to his chest, squeezing it within an inch of its life. The mother leans down and gives her son a kiss on his forehead, brushes a hand through his hair so less of it is hanging in his eyes. Without a word or another glance, she turns around and walks away.
The toddler covers his eyes as if counting to ten while playing hide-and-seek. When he pulls his hands away, his mother does not reappear. For a moment he is frightened, but then squeezes his toy elephant once more as if to say, It’s all right, Mommy will be back in a second. And there in the cart he waits.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store it’s not unusual to see an employee or department manager peeking out from behind the windows of swinging metal doors that lead back into the storage area, and today is no exception: a middle-aged gentleman watches from behind the swinging doors as the mother kisses the toddler on the forehead and turns and walks away. The manager waits a few moments to make certain no one is around, and then exits the storage area and approaches the cart. The toddler looks up at him and smiles. The manager smiles back, and then slowly pushes the cart down a few aisles, to the back of the Home Lighting Department.
The manager grabs a lamp from one of the displays, removes the shade, and places it to the side of the cart. He then reaches into the pocket of his manager’s smock and removes a toy doll’s head, which he jams into place atop the frame that protects the bulb. Without looking at the toddler—who seems somehow larger than before—he walks over to a wall phone, lifts the receiver, presses a button, and says for the entire store to hear, “Shoppers, we’ve got a special over in our Toy Department. All the latest Star Wars toys are thirty percent off for the next fifteen minutes. A Toy Department employee will be happy to put one of our green-light stickers on the item of your choice.” He hangs up and walks away. By now the little boy in the cart is crying—not a lot, not enough to draw the attention of any shopper who’s all but running to the Toy Department, but enough that even a hug from the elephant can’t stop the quiet tears.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store, you can always find a child who is crying.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store a line is forming at the Customer Service desk, and the woman who abandoned her toddler in the Hardware and Home Repair aisle is right at the front. She removes an envelope from her purse and hands it to the young man working the desk. He opens it, reads what is written on the piece of paper inside, nods to himself, and then begins pulling several thick books of coupons from a shelf below. He continues to stack the coupon books until there are twenty-five of them. The woman pulls a plastic bag from her purse, seeps the coupons into it until the bag threatens to burst, smiles at the young man, and then leaves the store, still smiling.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store many people leave smiling.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store the little boy in the cart is trying to wiggle his way out of the cart but his legs have gotten a bit too long and a bit too chubby. By now he’s all cried out and has nothing to hug because he’s dropped his elephant. He’s been moved several times, and each time someone jams a doll’s head onto a lamp and places it near the cart. The boy watches as customers whiz by, on their way to a special sale that seems to be in a department on the opposite end of the store. And so the little boy waits, but he doesn’t have to wait long.
At the New and Shiny Big-Box Store no one ever has to wait very long.
Soon the little boy becomes a larger boy who has split through most of his toddler clothing; soon the young boy is nearly naked, his privates covered only by the remnants of the clothes he was wearing when his mother brought him here; soon the young boy is a grown man whose weight the cart can no longer hold upright. The cart fl
ips forward, knocking over many of the impaled dolls’ heads that scatter like marbles. The force of the falling cart is enough to free the young man’s legs—a light shade of purple they seem to have become—and then the cart falls over him as if it were a cage being lowered from above.
The young man huddles beneath the cart, still crying, and tries to reach for his elephant, but it’s on the other side of the cart. The young man tries to reach it but cannot get the cart to budge. Eventually he gives up, huddles in a fetal position, and wishes that someone walking toward the next sale would notice him. But no one does, even when he calls out to them in a voice that sounds frayed around the edges.
He stays like that until he can no longer call out or even muster the tears to cry. He stays like that until his skin begins to wrinkle and his hair turns grey. He stays like that until the first manager to move the toddler’s cart emerges from the storage area and lifts the cart off the old man. The manager helps the old man to his feet and begins to dress him in the perfect, new, bright, shiny, perfectly pressed uniform of a store employee.
“Keeping this clean is your responsibility,” says the manager. “It has to be dry-cleaned, not washed.”
Helping the old man to put on his New and Shiny shoes, the manager walks the old man to the front of the store, explaining more of the store’s employee policies.
“The most important thing,” says the manager as he positions the old man by the entryway, “is to smile when you greet the customers. Remember that.”
He walks away, leaving the old man standing there, alone and confused. But then the old man sees a young woman come into the store holding a toddler, and a cute little thing he is. “Welcome,” he says. “Thank you for shopping with us. If you need any help, please don’t be afraid to ask.” He watches as the mother puts her little stinker in a cart, hands him a small stuffed elephant missing a tusk, and makes her way back toward Hardware and Home Repair. “Thank you,” the old man whispers, but it sounds more like a question.
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