Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 17 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I drove to the gardening store on the outskirts. A dozen cars and pickups, occupying a quarter of the parking spaces, had clustered to one side as if a lone parked car risked attracting a predator’s attack. I parked at the opposite end, bordering a barren stretch of land, to avoid the stench drawing curious onlookers.
How would the cashier see me? Did they activate some protocol when a man as jittery as me, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses, checked out with just a shovel? Would the cashier call the police?
I bought a sack of fertilizer, a shovel, a hoe, and a rake. As the cashier, a bald old man with bulging blue veins in his hands, scanned my items, he barely glanced up to mutter a greeting.
I hauled the bags out. While maneuvering between parked cars, I imagined my car smothered in a writhing mass of scurrying spiders and squirming worms, cascading down the bodywork and pooling on the asphalt like a gasoline spill. The darkness summoning its congregation for a black mass. But instead, a minivan had parked to the right of my car. By its open passenger door fumbled a heavyset man in a short-sleeved polo and khaki cargo shorts. Plenty of spaces were free, but he’d nestled close to my car for intimacy, for warmth. Natural as breathing.
I held my breath and opened my car’s rear door. I piled the fertilizer sack, shovel, hoe, and rake onto the seat.
A door slammed. Flip-flopped footsteps slapped toward me from behind.
“Your car reeks, buddy. Thought it’d been abandoned awhile, that the owner died inside.”
I stared, lips pursed. After five seconds, his friendly expression faltered. When I slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door, the man, as if recovering from a punch to the face, jerked awake and approached my half-open window. I started the engine; it sputtered.
“Buddy,” the man said, “I’m talking to you.”
I shifted into reverse, slammed the accelerator, and swung in a semicircle. As I roared out of the lot, backfiring, the man stood frozen in the lane, shouting in baffled outrage that someone had refused to engage when he wanted to talk.
Though I put a mile between myself and the oil field desert, I imagined the man pulling out his phone, reciting my license plate. Would the car’s stench and my behavior be enough for patrols to watch for my Chevrolet Lumina?
As I drove parallel to the spot—dozens of yards to the right—where I’d killed the boy, I white-knuckled the wheel, staring ahead unblinking. A mile later, I turned onto a bare dirt road edged with plastic strips, that split the oil field. My car brushed past shrubs with branches brittle as thorns. The oil pumps creaked and groaned in their antediluvian nodding.
I parked where the road opened to a miles-wide expanse of barren land on my right. I removed my sunglasses and squinted at the nuclear-dawn glow of orange and pink inflaming the horizon. Anyone passing would notice a grave being dug. I’d need to wait for night.
I stepped out to smoke, distancing myself from the fumes, though the rot had already lacquered my nostrils. I stepped over the plastic strip. As I dragged on my cigarette, I wandered into the parched land, toward sunset rays sliding along the horizon like foam on a wave’s crest. I avoided the elongated shadows of skeletal shrubs. Straw-like grass blades scratched my pant legs.
At an indistinct point, I sat, flicked the cigarette away, and fell backward. My spine settled into the cracked earth. I lay like some desert-crossed beast whose body had given out—except mine still functioned, though my will to go on had short-circuited or atrophied. It was pointless to even lift my head and witness the last lights sink behind the horizon. Like a balloon, I’d roll and snag on brittle branches at the first gust. Unanchored. All my life, I’d wandered this time and land as an intruder, exiled from a world I’d never reclaim.
Night thickened. A bluish light outlined the oil pumps. The sky’s dome glittered with constellations, planetarium-perfect. I had sat against an oil pump’s frame; with each nod, its creaks and wounded-animal moans vibrated through my bones.
I stood, stretched my legs, and marched to the trunk. I improvised a gas mask with my palm while unlocking the trunk with my free hand. Eyes shut, face turned, I lifted the lid. The greasy airburst hit me as if my skin had sprouted olfactory cells—a poison gas cloud, a bioweapon.
I swallowed bile and resisted fleeing. After pulling gloves from my work coat pockets, I plunged my arms into the trunk and groped the plastic-wrapped bundle’s underside for a grip. But the plastic slithered under liquid boils, suppurating blisters. I cradled the bundle. After tilting my head to gulp clean air, I heaved the corpse out. I crab-walked backward as the bundle dripped onto the dirt. Twenty paces away, I set the boy down and retreated. Returning to the car, I swept loose soil with my sneakers to mask the glistening splatter, like sprinkling sawdust on vomit.
I opened the rear door and grabbed the shovel. Ten paces from the corpse, I drove the shovel into the parched ground. The crusted earth disguised the hardness beneath.
Twenty minutes later, I climbed out of the four-foot hole. I stood panting. Sweat drenched my skin; my face steamed. My arms tingled forewarning tomorrow’s soreness. I planted the shovel and leaned on the handle to catch my breath.
A trick of light suggested the plastic-wrapped corpse was moving—the folds shifting, lumps sliding against the membrane like in a pregnant belly. I slid the shovel under the bundle, pried it inches off the ground, lugged it to the hole, and bent to drop it into the rectangular black pit. I shook the shovel until the plastic’s oozing phlegm sloughed off.
I was scooping dirt into the shovel when I paused. The oil pumps’ creaks returned, along with the distant storm-rush of traffic a couple miles off. Given my luck, I’d feared being followed—police, Héctor, the supervisor. Caught unprepared, squeezed for explanations. But the boy’s luck countered mine: born broken. That night, after fleeing a dungeon, he had crossed the dirt road I drove on, and tonight, only his killer would attend the funeral.
When I inhaled deeply, the stench seared my nostrils. I coughed.
“I’m burying you. I killed you. So I could say a few words.”
My voice scattered into the night, across the vast plain, like an intruder whispering in a burgled house at dawn, taunting its occupants to wake and attack.
“I’ve wondered why you ran. Whether you knew why. Where to. Those who kept you locked up, your family I guess, saw you as a monster to hide, to spare their stomachs. This world breeds people like you, who are born broken and suffer until death. The marks on your wrists—”
I froze. Quadrupedal steps probed the night toward me. I gripped the shovel like a halberd, legs braced. A cougar?
A long snout defined itself in the dark. The coyote stepped into the headlights’ cone, insects swarming like dirt on old film. It crouched. Its doglike eyes weighed me with fear and curiosity. When I stayed silent, it trotted to the oval of darkness, wrinkled its snout, and tilted its head as if to snag the bundle with its fangs.
I brandished the shovel, shouted. The coyote leaped back, eyes wild. Its gaping mouth was parched and ulcerated. It glanced at the hole.
“You kidding?” I said. “That hungry?”
I waved the shovel as I stepped forward. The coyote scurried toward my car. The headlights highlighted its mangy fur, scabby patches, curved gaps between its ribs. The animal melted into the night like a shark into depths.
I shoveled dirt. After hefting it, I tipped the load in a cascade down the mound.
“What was I saying? The marks on your wrists. Shackles. You were born, existed—for what? Suffered pointlessly, and the day they freed you or you escaped, someone sick of living hit you by accident. Now I’ll bury you so no one knows. I’ll spare people the memories you’d stir. For the rest of my life, I’ll remember where I buried you, and worry they’ll find you.”
A breeze rattled a shrub’s withered branches. I shoveled dirt into the black oval, sprinkling the plastic. I stabbed the shovel into the mound. My arms and legs weighed as if I’d climbed a mountain, energy and spirit drained for the descent.
“Some people drift through the waking hours half-dreaming, because the world tastes like a nightmare. Such chaos. No reasons to stay, nowhere to go. Our whole lives, we’re ruled by nature’s impulses, and we’ll disappear before fulfilling a fraction of our parasitic dreams. And for what? All this struggling, trying to find someone to love. Distractions on the road to the grave. Life’s unfair, and I’m making it worse.”
My sternum compressed as if punched. I gasped. My vision blurred. I leaned on the shovel.
“I’m making it worse.”
I stepped back. Teetered until my legs steadied.
The headlights’ glare split against my back; my giant shadow stretched like a tongue unrolled by the night. The oil pumps creaked and groaned. In the darkness, a lurking shape advanced toward me—until, at the last moment, the headlights would outline an outstretched, monstrous arm, fingers reaching to touch me.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead.
I drove to the gardening store on the outskirts. A dozen cars and pickups, occupying a quarter of the parking spaces, had clustered to one side as if a lone parked car risked attracting a predator’s attack. I parked at the opposite end, bordering a barren stretch of land, to avoid the stench drawing curious onlookers.
How would the cashier see me? Did they activate some protocol when a man as jittery as me, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses, checked out with just a shovel? Would the cashier call the police?
I bought a sack of fertilizer, a shovel, a hoe, and a rake. As the cashier, a bald old man with bulging blue veins in his hands, scanned my items, he barely glanced up to mutter a greeting.
I hauled the bags out. While maneuvering between parked cars, I imagined my car smothered in a writhing mass of scurrying spiders and squirming worms, cascading down the bodywork and pooling on the asphalt like a gasoline spill. The darkness summoning its congregation for a black mass. But instead, a minivan had parked to the right of my car. By its open passenger door fumbled a heavyset man in a short-sleeved polo and khaki cargo shorts. Plenty of spaces were free, but he’d nestled close to my car for intimacy, for warmth. Natural as breathing.
I held my breath and opened my car’s rear door. I piled the fertilizer sack, shovel, hoe, and rake onto the seat.
A door slammed. Flip-flopped footsteps slapped toward me from behind.
“Your car reeks, buddy. Thought it’d been abandoned awhile, that the owner died inside.”
I stared, lips pursed. After five seconds, his friendly expression faltered. When I slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door, the man, as if recovering from a punch to the face, jerked awake and approached my half-open window. I started the engine; it sputtered.
“Buddy,” the man said, “I’m talking to you.”
I shifted into reverse, slammed the accelerator, and swung in a semicircle. As I roared out of the lot, backfiring, the man stood frozen in the lane, shouting in baffled outrage that someone had refused to engage when he wanted to talk.
Though I put a mile between myself and the oil field desert, I imagined the man pulling out his phone, reciting my license plate. Would the car’s stench and my behavior be enough for patrols to watch for my Chevrolet Lumina?
As I drove parallel to the spot—dozens of yards to the right—where I’d killed the boy, I white-knuckled the wheel, staring ahead unblinking. A mile later, I turned onto a bare dirt road edged with plastic strips, that split the oil field. My car brushed past shrubs with branches brittle as thorns. The oil pumps creaked and groaned in their antediluvian nodding.
I parked where the road opened to a miles-wide expanse of barren land on my right. I removed my sunglasses and squinted at the nuclear-dawn glow of orange and pink inflaming the horizon. Anyone passing would notice a grave being dug. I’d need to wait for night.
I stepped out to smoke, distancing myself from the fumes, though the rot had already lacquered my nostrils. I stepped over the plastic strip. As I dragged on my cigarette, I wandered into the parched land, toward sunset rays sliding along the horizon like foam on a wave’s crest. I avoided the elongated shadows of skeletal shrubs. Straw-like grass blades scratched my pant legs.
At an indistinct point, I sat, flicked the cigarette away, and fell backward. My spine settled into the cracked earth. I lay like some desert-crossed beast whose body had given out—except mine still functioned, though my will to go on had short-circuited or atrophied. It was pointless to even lift my head and witness the last lights sink behind the horizon. Like a balloon, I’d roll and snag on brittle branches at the first gust. Unanchored. All my life, I’d wandered this time and land as an intruder, exiled from a world I’d never reclaim.
Night thickened. A bluish light outlined the oil pumps. The sky’s dome glittered with constellations, planetarium-perfect. I had sat against an oil pump’s frame; with each nod, its creaks and wounded-animal moans vibrated through my bones.
I stood, stretched my legs, and marched to the trunk. I improvised a gas mask with my palm while unlocking the trunk with my free hand. Eyes shut, face turned, I lifted the lid. The greasy airburst hit me as if my skin had sprouted olfactory cells—a poison gas cloud, a bioweapon.
I swallowed bile and resisted fleeing. After pulling gloves from my work coat pockets, I plunged my arms into the trunk and groped the plastic-wrapped bundle’s underside for a grip. But the plastic slithered under liquid boils, suppurating blisters. I cradled the bundle. After tilting my head to gulp clean air, I heaved the corpse out. I crab-walked backward as the bundle dripped onto the dirt. Twenty paces away, I set the boy down and retreated. Returning to the car, I swept loose soil with my sneakers to mask the glistening splatter, like sprinkling sawdust on vomit.
I opened the rear door and grabbed the shovel. Ten paces from the corpse, I drove the shovel into the parched ground. The crusted earth disguised the hardness beneath.
Twenty minutes later, I climbed out of the four-foot hole. I stood panting. Sweat drenched my skin; my face steamed. My arms tingled forewarning tomorrow’s soreness. I planted the shovel and leaned on the handle to catch my breath.
A trick of light suggested the plastic-wrapped corpse was moving—the folds shifting, lumps sliding against the membrane like in a pregnant belly. I slid the shovel under the bundle, pried it inches off the ground, lugged it to the hole, and bent to drop it into the rectangular black pit. I shook the shovel until the plastic’s oozing phlegm sloughed off.
I was scooping dirt into the shovel when I paused. The oil pumps’ creaks returned, along with the distant storm-rush of traffic a couple miles off. Given my luck, I’d feared being followed—police, Héctor, the supervisor. Caught unprepared, squeezed for explanations. But the boy’s luck countered mine: born broken. That night, after fleeing a dungeon, he had crossed the dirt road I drove on, and tonight, only his killer would attend the funeral.
When I inhaled deeply, the stench seared my nostrils. I coughed.
“I’m burying you. I killed you. So I could say a few words.”
My voice scattered into the night, across the vast plain, like an intruder whispering in a burgled house at dawn, taunting its occupants to wake and attack.
“I’ve wondered why you ran. Whether you knew why. Where to. Those who kept you locked up, your family I guess, saw you as a monster to hide, to spare their stomachs. This world breeds people like you, who are born broken and suffer until death. The marks on your wrists—”
I froze. Quadrupedal steps probed the night toward me. I gripped the shovel like a halberd, legs braced. A cougar?
A long snout defined itself in the dark. The coyote stepped into the headlights’ cone, insects swarming like dirt on old film. It crouched. Its doglike eyes weighed me with fear and curiosity. When I stayed silent, it trotted to the oval of darkness, wrinkled its snout, and tilted its head as if to snag the bundle with its fangs.
I brandished the shovel, shouted. The coyote leaped back, eyes wild. Its gaping mouth was parched and ulcerated. It glanced at the hole.
“You kidding?” I said. “That hungry?”
I waved the shovel as I stepped forward. The coyote scurried toward my car. The headlights highlighted its mangy fur, scabby patches, curved gaps between its ribs. The animal melted into the night like a shark into depths.
I shoveled dirt. After hefting it, I tipped the load in a cascade down the mound.
“What was I saying? The marks on your wrists. Shackles. You were born, existed—for what? Suffered pointlessly, and the day they freed you or you escaped, someone sick of living hit you by accident. Now I’ll bury you so no one knows. I’ll spare people the memories you’d stir. For the rest of my life, I’ll remember where I buried you, and worry they’ll find you.”
A breeze rattled a shrub’s withered branches. I shoveled dirt into the black oval, sprinkling the plastic. I stabbed the shovel into the mound. My arms and legs weighed as if I’d climbed a mountain, energy and spirit drained for the descent.
“Some people drift through the waking hours half-dreaming, because the world tastes like a nightmare. Such chaos. No reasons to stay, nowhere to go. Our whole lives, we’re ruled by nature’s impulses, and we’ll disappear before fulfilling a fraction of our parasitic dreams. And for what? All this struggling, trying to find someone to love. Distractions on the road to the grave. Life’s unfair, and I’m making it worse.”
My sternum compressed as if punched. I gasped. My vision blurred. I leaned on the shovel.
“I’m making it worse.”
I stepped back. Teetered until my legs steadied.
The headlights’ glare split against my back; my giant shadow stretched like a tongue unrolled by the night. The oil pumps creaked and groaned. In the darkness, a lurking shape advanced toward me—until, at the last moment, the headlights would outline an outstretched, monstrous arm, fingers reaching to touch me.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead.
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