A Vomitorium for Terrasites

Dumpsterville

this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).

Oh the inhumanity! You awaken. Upheaval to boot.  Unkempt extents stretch on without apology. A wake-willing waft of rancid coffee rushes over you.  The atmosphere is nothing, if not acid.

Quions trundle by never wondering at the untrustworthy underneath.  The nethers thunder ruthlessly. The Quions exude apathy, belying their gutshot existences.

Hope upends.

You notice the anonymity with sudden, resounding shock.  No acknowledgment from the Quions.  It’s hard to tell if you exist here or if you are somehow viewing this scene through some clandestine portal.  No matter, hold no doubt, the environment impresses upon you conclusively.

Colors are washed into a diseased orange.  Lo-pressure sodium bulbs no doubt.  Like a Wal-Mart parking lot at 3 a.m.  The carnivore-red Ford Festiva would look beige here, as would the piercing azure in the eyes of the Lady of the Lake offering Excalibur aloft.  The watery tart!

You wallow in refuse, in refusal and denial.  The bed in which you lie seems to be garbage decades old.  In fact the Maruchan wrapper caught on your ear faintly recalls an expiration date circa 10 years ago.

“What year is it?  How do I know that?”  The Tran-SI-tion… ah yes.

A surreptitious head’s lean out from this offensive bed yields a near divine intuition on your surroundings.  You don’t dare toss the scalawag ramen noodle wrapper, nor even move a single, unnecessary muscle.  Terror: it is the only sure thing here.

This furtive glancer, your sister, stirs from her slumber in disguise, silently raises up on an elbow in the rubbish.  Only now can you realize your own decrepitude. Your hand flies to your mouth to find a random deficit of teeth, like running your fingers over a pearly Fibonacci sequence.  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, Devendra’s ASS!  Poor sister isn’t the pinnacle of personal weal, but her recently revived response to your ugly mug invites no personal confidence.  It’s time to flee.  The next Channel, we must escape!

This place is a dumpster.  Literally.  You lie in a dumpster, on top of a dumpster, on top of a dumpster.  Around you, three stories tall in robotic order lie similar tenements.  In fact, after three blinks, they are the same.  Symmetry pervades.  Nauseating symmetry.  The rows extend beyond your short sight, the air is fuzzy.  But from what you can gather the only lifestyle is that into which you have awakened.  All you see are lines of dumpsters, stacked on one another, weighing themselves down, weighing each other down.  Orange light defies the once-calculated beauty of the decayed components of this place.

Poetry has perished.

What is extraordinary is the irrefutable and pervading sense of stealth.  The Quions that trundle by clearly cannot perceive your presence, nor your sister’s.  However any sense of security is paperthin.  Enough fluff, time to thicken your skin.

You whisper, “Sis.”

“I’m here, Terras.”

“What now?”

“Shouldn’t we dig?  I’m so hungry.”

“I’m scared Sis. Things aren’t right.”

“We should dig.”

You climb and amble down from your unfortunate perch.  No bird stirs.  The wind in the avenue is deafening, blowing a torrent of filth in your eyes.  Orange everywhere now browned out by the teeming gusts.  Anyone you see is following you.  Anyone you see.

As the desperation sinks in, you notice your sister’s eyes flitting to the barely-seen corners you pass.  Walking quickly, you pass many corners, of course.  The moon is an imaginary orb, an imperceptible, periodic source of general glow.  The orange pallor is penetrating.  Whatever sun there might be out there is also too dim to be noticed, too distant to reach this sphere of degradation.  What luck!  Better get a move on.

Entropy has accelerated here and there’s no point in fighting it.  Or am I just late?  Is it late? Every hungry glance from a passing Quion reinforces this.  It would be inexplicably lucky that you survived the night, had your Transitory Umbra not foreseen the complex dismay here.

“Let’s leave.”

It’s a long walk to the river, half an hour, hard to tell.  The sky is less monochromatically umber here, clouds swirl and curl violently.  The river is more an ocean, two miles wide by Sis’s estimation, and the caps and troughs could envelop a U-Haul of whatever size or designation.  The outermost rows of domiciles along the shore consist of the trailers from semi-tractors long left to trail without sufficient tract, beached ship containers, rusted steel boxes shielding rusty, steely denizens.

And then…