Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 18 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I woke up lying on my back atop cracked earth. When I peeled myself off the ground, stiffness in my arms and legs seized my muscles. The sun breached the horizon, a bisected sphere blazing like an oven.
I staggered forward while pressing my temples and blinking to clear my vision. My skull throbbed. My limbs hung leaden, as if I’d dreamed of fleeing a killer. I felt swollen with tar sloshing inside me; one stumble and it’d surge from my mouth.
Where I’d dug and refilled the hole last night, an oval of disturbed earth stood out—a fresh grave in some makeshift cemetery. Any maintenance worker tending the oil pumps might spot it.
My Chevrolet Lumina, reeking of pestilence, sprawled under the dawn’s glare like a naked newborn in snowfall. I hobbled toward it, fighting my buckling legs.
Minutes later, I hurtled down the dirt road. My consciousness plunged and surfaced in feverish waves. Beasts kill to eat or survive; I carted this shattered child’s corpse like trash awaiting a dump.
Warm air rushed through the window, scouring my skin. The oxygen molecules seared me. I merged onto the highway toward the sprawl of single-story buildings, apartments, and office towers. I weaved between delivery trucks and commuters while flames licked and blackened my car’s frame, escaping through the windows.
I deserved lifelong torture, not a cell. An act to redeem the world for spawning something as toxic as me. Yet prison bars awaited; I knew it clearly now as the fact that one day my heart would stop. I doubted even other prisoners appreciated child-killers. Who would defend me? A lawyer that would stretch logic to wring jury sympathy? Embellish stories about my war trauma? Claim the shrapnel that had gotten embedded in my cheekbone and had slit open my cornea justified a reduced sentence?
Once they safely locked me behind bars, cops would comb the city for the basement that had held the boy I’d killed. They’d find his parents—grotesques fit for a Victorian freakshow: the man pig-eyed in an egg-shaped skull, coin-gray skin, jagged rotten teeth; the woman a sack of fat, greasy hair, squirrel-cheek jowls, a frayed shirt draping her striated blue belly. No—a magazine-perfect blonde couple, both smiling, the man in a pressed shirt and tie, the woman in a shimmering blouse and platinum earrings. Their pine-scented home hiding a trapdoor to a concrete cellar with wall rings and coiled iron chains. Years of filth, piss, and shit.
Cops would shove the couple into a media scrum, cameras aimed like firing squad rifles. Under pulsing red-blue lights, their panic-twisted faces would weep as officers crammed them into a cruiser. The cops would let that couple explain themselves, though I hoped someone would spit that chaining their deformed, cow-stupid child underground stole his future.
Would my former supervisor see the arrest news? Do people like her watch the news? Maybe over breakfast, she’d glance up at the boy’s reconstructed face, and her smile would collapse. Once her limbs obeyed again, she’d cross herself and change the channel.
I reached the single-story brick-and-glass police station. A mesquite tree clawed near the entrance, tar-black branches veined beige, half-obscuring the limp Texas and U.S. flags.
I parked in an empty side of the lot, away from the patrol cars. I exited the Lumina. Dizziness and weakness had drenched me in sweat; my heart hammered near cardiac rupture.
Two figures stood by the glass doors. An officer with her straw-colored hair in a ponytail—leathery face, ranger-lean frame—had placed a hand on an old man’s shoulder. The man held on to a dog leash attached to nothing.
“She came back alone twice before,” the officer said. “I doubt she’s stolen. Give it time, search the neighborhood. By the afternoon, if she’s still missing, call us and we’ll figure out what we can do.”
The old man trudged away, brow sunk.
After clearing my throat, I called after the officer, but she was reentering the station, and the door’s squealing hinges silenced me. She blurred behind reflective glass as I hurried after her.
Once inside, my footsteps echoed across the air-conditioned lobby’s tiles. The officer circled behind the rear desk, settled into a chair, exhaled sharply, and typed. Nearby, a hunched cleaning lady swept.
I dragged myself to the desk. The morning KRLD newscaster droned on an unseen radio. Some paces away, a glass door led deeper into the station. Uniforms milled in the hallway.
“Good morning,” I told the officer.
She frowned, then jerked her head toward the plastic benches bolted to a wall.
“Just a moment, please.”
I drummed the desk. Should I push? No, they’d uncover my crime soon enough, so I shuffled over there and slumped onto a bench. Its plastic groaned.
Her typing clacked like tap shoes as she squinted at the screen, crow’s feet fanning. Two brawny black officers passed—one buzzcut, the other with coffee-brown stubble—trailing deodorant. They greeted her and vanished down the hall.
The cleaning lady crouched, sweeping dust and wrappers. The officer summoned me. I stood up and approached the desk. She took a sip of her mug while eyeing me like I’d interrupted her in the bathroom.
I took a deep breath and regained my voice.
“I want to turn myself in.”
“Remove your glasses. This is a police station.”
It unnerved me as if she had demanded me to tear out my healthy eye. My hand trembled as I slid the sunglasses off, then hooked one of its temples into my collar. Her starched navy uniform, straw-colored hair, bronze skin, and metallic gaze sharpened. Her oval badge glared like a mirror, reflecting fluorescent light onto my face.
She studied my scarred cheekbone and dead eye.
“Fireworks mishap?”
“IED in a ditch, a mile and a half from Kirkuk. I’m surrendering.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m surrendering for a crime.”
Her mug clacked against the desk, then she rolled her chair back. Her stare judged me an overlooked bank robber or serial killer.
“What’d you do?”
Words jammed against my lips. I gripped the desk to steady myself.
“I hit a kid. Killed him. I was driving at night near an oil field in the outskirts when the kid darted out. My headlights caught him too late. Not a hit-and-run, I don’t think, ’cause I took the body. Hid it for a couple of days. I thought of dismembering him and scattering his pieces. Last night I tried burying him, but I realized my mistake, so this morning I’ve driven here.”
She bowed her head as if reading a desk-carved note, then she exhaled and stood up stiffly, hand on holster.
“Stay calm. You said you tried to bury the body. Where is it now?”
“In the trunk of my car.”
We marched outside. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the policewoman’s right hand fiddling with the flap of her holster, and with every step, I heard the clink of her handcuffs sliding. I led the woman to my car while squinting against the sun. The stench from the trunk clawed up my nose. I turned to the officer, whose expression had soured. Until now I might have passed for any lunatic who’d claimed to have run over a child, but the reek of corpse confirmed me as a madman parading said dead child in his car’s trunk.
I pulled out the key.
“You might want to cover your nose.”
She fixed me with a glare, as if she’d sniffed out a ploy to snatch her gun.
“Just open it.”
I turned the key in the lock and lifted the lid. The breath of some carrion monster escaped—rotted meat festering between its teeth. The officer recoiled, coughed sideways, and cursed. When she peered into the trunk, her face betrayed that the image inside would haunt her dreams, nights she’d spend thrashing in sweat-soaked sheets.
She slid the baton free from her belt. I stepped back, but the woman prodded the corpse with its tip, flipping it onto its side. Through the torn plastic peeked the child’s features: a misshapen nose, the cleft of a hare lip. Blotched greenish skin, glistening with grease, crawled with white maggots.
The officer spoke as if stifling a cough.
“Something’s wrong with this boy.”
“He’s rotting.”
“His face. The features. One of those… retarded kids.”
“One of them?”
The woman clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting nausea. She forced herself to meet my eyes, hers sharp with the urge to slam me face-first and kneel on my spine.
“Where’d you say you hit him?”
“I was driving at night through one of those roads near the oil fields. To clear my head. I was within the speed limit, but the kid dashed in front of the car even though he must’ve seen the headlights, heard the engine.”
“If it was an accident, why didn’t you call the police?”
“I’m an idiot. And human beings disgust me.”
The officer scanned me head-to-toe. She stole another glance into the trunk as if verifying my story.
“Some woman’s birthing these retards in a house of horrors. Family members getting freaky is my guess. They lock them in rooms or basements, but a few escaped. Maybe the parents got careless. Maybe they got tired of tossing scraps or dumping piss buckets, so they let the freaks loose knowing they’d end up roadkill for someone else to scrape off. Nobody taught them roads or cars. The last one wandered train tracks like a sidewalk. Doubt he understood the horn blaring as the engine plowed into him. No one claimed those kids, no one’ll claim this one. Bet they’re relieved to be rid of them.” She adjusted her collar and shook her head. “In this job, I see too much shit I’d rather forget.”
A chill surged through me, pooling in my gut. My words barely rose above a whisper.
“There were others.”
“What? Others? Yeah, at least three, yours included. Better you didn’t know. Folks stomach car crashes, robberies, drive-bys. This… this ruins your digestion.”
A grimace seized my face like a puppet’s.
The officer clicked her tongue and slammed the trunk. She jerked her chin toward the station.
“Follow me. We’ll fill out paperwork.”
She strode ahead to the glass doors. I obeyed but slowed my steps until, as she opened the door and slipped inside, I backpedaled. When the door shut, I was already circling the car at a sprint. I yanked the driver’s door open, folded myself into the seat, and twisted the ignition. The engine roared. As the front right wheel mounted then dropped off the curb, the rearview mirror framed the officer, gaping, frozen in place.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was written in Spanish nearly ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Country Death Song” by Violent Femmes.
The next part will conclude this novella.
I woke up lying on my back atop cracked earth. When I peeled myself off the ground, stiffness in my arms and legs seized my muscles. The sun breached the horizon, a bisected sphere blazing like an oven.
I staggered forward while pressing my temples and blinking to clear my vision. My skull throbbed. My limbs hung leaden, as if I’d dreamed of fleeing a killer. I felt swollen with tar sloshing inside me; one stumble and it’d surge from my mouth.
Where I’d dug and refilled the hole last night, an oval of disturbed earth stood out—a fresh grave in some makeshift cemetery. Any maintenance worker tending the oil pumps might spot it.
My Chevrolet Lumina, reeking of pestilence, sprawled under the dawn’s glare like a naked newborn in snowfall. I hobbled toward it, fighting my buckling legs.
Minutes later, I hurtled down the dirt road. My consciousness plunged and surfaced in feverish waves. Beasts kill to eat or survive; I carted this shattered child’s corpse like trash awaiting a dump.
Warm air rushed through the window, scouring my skin. The oxygen molecules seared me. I merged onto the highway toward the sprawl of single-story buildings, apartments, and office towers. I weaved between delivery trucks and commuters while flames licked and blackened my car’s frame, escaping through the windows.
I deserved lifelong torture, not a cell. An act to redeem the world for spawning something as toxic as me. Yet prison bars awaited; I knew it clearly now as the fact that one day my heart would stop. I doubted even other prisoners appreciated child-killers. Who would defend me? A lawyer that would stretch logic to wring jury sympathy? Embellish stories about my war trauma? Claim the shrapnel that had gotten embedded in my cheekbone and had slit open my cornea justified a reduced sentence?
Once they safely locked me behind bars, cops would comb the city for the basement that had held the boy I’d killed. They’d find his parents—grotesques fit for a Victorian freakshow: the man pig-eyed in an egg-shaped skull, coin-gray skin, jagged rotten teeth; the woman a sack of fat, greasy hair, squirrel-cheek jowls, a frayed shirt draping her striated blue belly. No—a magazine-perfect blonde couple, both smiling, the man in a pressed shirt and tie, the woman in a shimmering blouse and platinum earrings. Their pine-scented home hiding a trapdoor to a concrete cellar with wall rings and coiled iron chains. Years of filth, piss, and shit.
Cops would shove the couple into a media scrum, cameras aimed like firing squad rifles. Under pulsing red-blue lights, their panic-twisted faces would weep as officers crammed them into a cruiser. The cops would let that couple explain themselves, though I hoped someone would spit that chaining their deformed, cow-stupid child underground stole his future.
Would my former supervisor see the arrest news? Do people like her watch the news? Maybe over breakfast, she’d glance up at the boy’s reconstructed face, and her smile would collapse. Once her limbs obeyed again, she’d cross herself and change the channel.
I reached the single-story brick-and-glass police station. A mesquite tree clawed near the entrance, tar-black branches veined beige, half-obscuring the limp Texas and U.S. flags.
I parked in an empty side of the lot, away from the patrol cars. I exited the Lumina. Dizziness and weakness had drenched me in sweat; my heart hammered near cardiac rupture.
Two figures stood by the glass doors. An officer with her straw-colored hair in a ponytail—leathery face, ranger-lean frame—had placed a hand on an old man’s shoulder. The man held on to a dog leash attached to nothing.
“She came back alone twice before,” the officer said. “I doubt she’s stolen. Give it time, search the neighborhood. By the afternoon, if she’s still missing, call us and we’ll figure out what we can do.”
The old man trudged away, brow sunk.
After clearing my throat, I called after the officer, but she was reentering the station, and the door’s squealing hinges silenced me. She blurred behind reflective glass as I hurried after her.
Once inside, my footsteps echoed across the air-conditioned lobby’s tiles. The officer circled behind the rear desk, settled into a chair, exhaled sharply, and typed. Nearby, a hunched cleaning lady swept.
I dragged myself to the desk. The morning KRLD newscaster droned on an unseen radio. Some paces away, a glass door led deeper into the station. Uniforms milled in the hallway.
“Good morning,” I told the officer.
She frowned, then jerked her head toward the plastic benches bolted to a wall.
“Just a moment, please.”
I drummed the desk. Should I push? No, they’d uncover my crime soon enough, so I shuffled over there and slumped onto a bench. Its plastic groaned.
Her typing clacked like tap shoes as she squinted at the screen, crow’s feet fanning. Two brawny black officers passed—one buzzcut, the other with coffee-brown stubble—trailing deodorant. They greeted her and vanished down the hall.
The cleaning lady crouched, sweeping dust and wrappers. The officer summoned me. I stood up and approached the desk. She took a sip of her mug while eyeing me like I’d interrupted her in the bathroom.
I took a deep breath and regained my voice.
“I want to turn myself in.”
“Remove your glasses. This is a police station.”
It unnerved me as if she had demanded me to tear out my healthy eye. My hand trembled as I slid the sunglasses off, then hooked one of its temples into my collar. Her starched navy uniform, straw-colored hair, bronze skin, and metallic gaze sharpened. Her oval badge glared like a mirror, reflecting fluorescent light onto my face.
She studied my scarred cheekbone and dead eye.
“Fireworks mishap?”
“IED in a ditch, a mile and a half from Kirkuk. I’m surrendering.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m surrendering for a crime.”
Her mug clacked against the desk, then she rolled her chair back. Her stare judged me an overlooked bank robber or serial killer.
“What’d you do?”
Words jammed against my lips. I gripped the desk to steady myself.
“I hit a kid. Killed him. I was driving at night near an oil field in the outskirts when the kid darted out. My headlights caught him too late. Not a hit-and-run, I don’t think, ’cause I took the body. Hid it for a couple of days. I thought of dismembering him and scattering his pieces. Last night I tried burying him, but I realized my mistake, so this morning I’ve driven here.”
She bowed her head as if reading a desk-carved note, then she exhaled and stood up stiffly, hand on holster.
“Stay calm. You said you tried to bury the body. Where is it now?”
“In the trunk of my car.”
We marched outside. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the policewoman’s right hand fiddling with the flap of her holster, and with every step, I heard the clink of her handcuffs sliding. I led the woman to my car while squinting against the sun. The stench from the trunk clawed up my nose. I turned to the officer, whose expression had soured. Until now I might have passed for any lunatic who’d claimed to have run over a child, but the reek of corpse confirmed me as a madman parading said dead child in his car’s trunk.
I pulled out the key.
“You might want to cover your nose.”
She fixed me with a glare, as if she’d sniffed out a ploy to snatch her gun.
“Just open it.”
I turned the key in the lock and lifted the lid. The breath of some carrion monster escaped—rotted meat festering between its teeth. The officer recoiled, coughed sideways, and cursed. When she peered into the trunk, her face betrayed that the image inside would haunt her dreams, nights she’d spend thrashing in sweat-soaked sheets.
She slid the baton free from her belt. I stepped back, but the woman prodded the corpse with its tip, flipping it onto its side. Through the torn plastic peeked the child’s features: a misshapen nose, the cleft of a hare lip. Blotched greenish skin, glistening with grease, crawled with white maggots.
The officer spoke as if stifling a cough.
“Something’s wrong with this boy.”
“He’s rotting.”
“His face. The features. One of those… retarded kids.”
“One of them?”
The woman clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting nausea. She forced herself to meet my eyes, hers sharp with the urge to slam me face-first and kneel on my spine.
“Where’d you say you hit him?”
“I was driving at night through one of those roads near the oil fields. To clear my head. I was within the speed limit, but the kid dashed in front of the car even though he must’ve seen the headlights, heard the engine.”
“If it was an accident, why didn’t you call the police?”
“I’m an idiot. And human beings disgust me.”
The officer scanned me head-to-toe. She stole another glance into the trunk as if verifying my story.
“Some woman’s birthing these retards in a house of horrors. Family members getting freaky is my guess. They lock them in rooms or basements, but a few escaped. Maybe the parents got careless. Maybe they got tired of tossing scraps or dumping piss buckets, so they let the freaks loose knowing they’d end up roadkill for someone else to scrape off. Nobody taught them roads or cars. The last one wandered train tracks like a sidewalk. Doubt he understood the horn blaring as the engine plowed into him. No one claimed those kids, no one’ll claim this one. Bet they’re relieved to be rid of them.” She adjusted her collar and shook her head. “In this job, I see too much shit I’d rather forget.”
A chill surged through me, pooling in my gut. My words barely rose above a whisper.
“There were others.”
“What? Others? Yeah, at least three, yours included. Better you didn’t know. Folks stomach car crashes, robberies, drive-bys. This… this ruins your digestion.”
A grimace seized my face like a puppet’s.
The officer clicked her tongue and slammed the trunk. She jerked her chin toward the station.
“Follow me. We’ll fill out paperwork.”
She strode ahead to the glass doors. I obeyed but slowed my steps until, as she opened the door and slipped inside, I backpedaled. When the door shut, I was already circling the car at a sprint. I yanked the driver’s door open, folded myself into the seat, and twisted the ignition. The engine roared. As the front right wheel mounted then dropped off the curb, the rearview mirror framed the officer, gaping, frozen in place.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was written in Spanish nearly ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Country Death Song” by Violent Femmes.
The next part will conclude this novella.
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