by Aimee Bender
Aimless is very rich. All of us dig through the rotten trash to survive—what else is there to do?—but Aimless is luckier than the rest. Aimless finds incredible things, constantly. He has magic powers. He has The Knack. And while most people throw back what they can’t eat or smoke or burn for fuel, Aimless is a collector.
Aimless collects animals. He has hundreds of metal fish, several rubber snakes, a stuffed bird with no head, and numerous porcelain cats, or parts of porcelain cats, or broken shards of porcelain which he says remind him of cats. All of these decorate his tight, frozen, stinking metal home, or are hoarded in the catacombs of scrap underneath.
Aimless collects photographs. Pictures from the times before the fat overlords owned absolutely everything, the times when stupid people like us still had clothing and lived indoors and ate food. Most photographs from the Stuff Era are curiously inedible, but I would still gladly burn them for heat. Aimless, however, would rather sleep in the cold than sacrifice these scraps of paper.
Aimless collects nautical supplies. He has an anchor, and some rope. He has glass floats and old, rotten nets, useful for catching the fish that used to live in the sea, but no longer. He has an eye patch—I’m not sure what makes this a nautical supply, but he insists it’s crucial. He has a rusty compass and a pile of mildewed nautical charts. He once caught me chewing on one of them—mildew is considered a delicacy in our colony—and smashed me in the nose with the anchor.
“Without those charts,” he said, “how can I find Gertie?”
Aimless collects so many things ... anything bright and shiny, anything ancient and hand-worn, anything that might be at home in his dreams. Anything and everything useless and inedible, he caches and catalogues in the holes he’s dug beneath his van in the side of his cliff, all of his lovely collections waiting to be someday dragged down into the shit-dark sea by a tidal wave of crap.
Aimless is insane. But he’s also rich, and he has a lot of drugs. I’m happy that he calls me his friend. Sometimes he vanishes for months at a time, but when he’s around, we dig in the trash together. I watch the sky with his telescope, ready to dive for cover if the fat people notice us, while Aimless waves a crooked stick back and forth over the shit-greased piles of debris, his eyes closed, listening, wandering in short steps, sniffing the fetid air ... and then suddenly he dives, attacking the earth with his digging stick, scraping and scuttling at the plastic bags and debris with silent assurance until he conjures forth some beautiful or meaningful or edible fragment from the Age of Stuff.
This time, it’s a small plastic model of some kind of boat. He holds it triumphantly up to the sky, smiling with pride. A toy. A yellow submarine.
I ask him the ultimate question of my people: are you going to eat that? But I know better. What he has found is clearly a nautical supply. So we keep digging, searching for the perfect gift for an imaginary whale.
ARE YOU GOING TO EAT THAT?
Rubber is chewy. I can chew on a piece of rubber for days before it loses its flavor and finally begins to crumble. One of my favorite things to chew is an old shoe, especially if it carries the flavor of an antique human foot.
Plastic is crunchy. There are many kinds of plastic; some kinds I can eat, others make me vomit. But they all provide texture. Because I am always coughing, I must eat very slowly. It’s easy to choke on plastic.
Shit tastes terrible. But it’s all over everything. The turds of the flying fat people are the only steady component of our diets. We scrape, we rub, we tap and polish everything we pull out of the shit-soaked ground, but still, we eat an awful lot of shit.
Every now and then, the fat people throw us a bone. It amuses them to do so. The day I was born, it rained shit-covered cheeseburgers. They shot down from the sky in hot greasy fusillades, smacking people in the heads and backs, exploding on the ground. I’m told it was the most beautiful day in our history, a day without hunger, a day my father loved to remember. That’s why he named me Cheeseburger.
Or else he planned to eat me.
THE WEATHER
Today it rained shit and exercise videos. These were shit-coated cardboard boxes painted, on the front, with a picture of an incredibly clean, well-fed woman, a woman with all her teeth and perfect skin, clad in angelic blue and grey clothing, standing in a warm, sun-filled room, smiling, smiling, smiling. And on the back of each box, her solemn promise: you will lose the weight you want to lose. And keep it off.
Inside each box was a black plastic tray, and centered on each tray was a shiny, reflective disc. I find these discs in the trash piles all the time. They are difficult to eat. But the cardboard box itself wasn’t bad. The ink tastes terrible, but the boxes were flat with a smooth surface; you could scrape just about all the shit off of them.
One month ago, it rained shit and George Foreman Grills. Giant useless iron apparatuses from the era of propane gas in canisters. One of these grills fell on my cousin Beef and killed him. Then Mrs. Teeth ate his body. Many of the other grills exploded into bits of jagged metal when they hit the ground, scattering razor-edged shards that still cut my feet when I step on them. My aunt Crazins stepped on one, and her foot became infected. Her leg turned fat and yellow, and she was unable to run. So Mrs. Teeth ate her too.
One thing about the weather: if you don’t like it, stick around and it’ll get worse. Sometimes it rains Sony PlayStation Twos and shit. Sometimes it rains flat plasma televisions and shit. I remember the horrible day when it rained NordicTrack Fitness Systems and shit. Many people died.
MRS. TEETH
The woman in our colony called Mrs. Teeth is much bigger than the rest of us, and older. She’s not fat or huge like the people in the sky, but compared to my own gaunt stick-frame of a body she is like a great pillar of angry meat with huge, loose, hairy breasts and long, snatching fingers. She is very very clean and white, because she refuses to eat shit.
Mrs. Teeth doesn’t suffer from the general sickness. She doesn’t cough, she isn’t racked with chills or pox on her skin. She is tall and wide and healthy. She has all her teeth, and she likes to bare them. “Grrrrrr!” she says. Her eyes are close together and her voice is loud and frightening.
Because Mrs. Teeth doesn’t have the sickness, there isn’t much she can eat. The fungus in my belly, I’ve learned, can break down almost anything and convert it into fuel for The Host. That’s me—I am The Host. The fungus in my belly is slowly eating me, very slowly it is eating us all, but it also helps us to survive on this landscape of trash and shit. The point of my survival is lost on me, but feeding the hunger is a habit I can’t break. The fungus in my belly is like a starving child, always crying. I like to think that it loves me, my hungry sickness. I try to be a good host.
Mrs. Teeth is a poor host. Her fungus left her.
Mrs. Teeth is family. She’s my mother’s sister’s husband’s mother’s sister. Since my father’s sister’s husband was also her half-brother, Mrs. Teeth is also my aunt. We are all family in this colony. That’s why my lower lip curls around toward my left ear, and also why my cousin Beef had no arms to deflect the George Foreman Grill that crushed him. We are defective recycled products.
But we’re family, so we look after each other. Whenever one of us finds something in the trash that Mrs. Teeth could eat, they set it aside for her, even though we too are starving. We do this for her out of love.
We also do it so she won’t eat us. Mrs. Teeth is so strong, so fast, so hungry. When one of our colony dies, or is about to die, or shows signs of possibly nearing death, Mrs. Teeth smiles, and begins to drool.
Mrs. Teeth is a very pious woman. She worships the fat people in the sky, the gods of Fat Heaven. She believes our fat owners are the source of all goodness, wisdom and justice—not that we have any of that down here. But you must never argue with Mrs. Teeth, because she bites, and her teeth are full of diseases that stick in your flesh and make you sick. Then, when you grow ill, Mrs. Teeth follows you around waiting for you to fall.
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sp; Mrs. Teeth becomes very angry if anyone ever complains about the precious gifts the fat people have shat upon us. “Rejoice!” she cries whenever it comes dumping down. “Hallelujah!” she screams, and dances, and points at the sky. “Praise them!” And if you are near her when this happens, then you had better bow down and pray, because, as I said before, she bites.
Mrs. Teeth is very insane, very dangerous. I try very hard to stay away from her. But I would rather be eaten by Mrs. Teeth than give anything, even thanks, to those evil fat pigs in the sky.
AIMLESS’S GUITAR
Last night it was too cold to sleep, so I went to find Aimless and his drugs. I found him on the edge of the cliff, sitting cross-legged on a dry patch of elevated sky-turd ... and do you know what I found him doing?
I found him playing a guitar!
He found it in the trash, he said. An entire guitar! I have never even found a box the size of a guitar, and if I had found such a box it would have been crushed and full of feces.
Aimless’s guitar is clean, uncrushed, it has three intact strings and spaces for three more. Maybe Aimless will find those too, the lucky bastard.
Oh, how my stomach churned, gazing at that beautiful, beautiful guitar. I have never even found a stick as thick as the neck of that guitar, in all my years of trash. Oh, how I dreamed of seizing it from him and lighting it afire, just to bring a moment’s warmth to my cold, naked life. How I longed to bite off a corner of that guitar—just a tiny corner—and feel the splintery wood dissolving in my stomach.
Aimless strummed the guitar tunelessly, gazing out into the freezing, shit-dark sea. He ignored my astonishment over his sudden production of this astounding relic, and my anger at the useless way he toyed with it—as if he and I and all of us in the colony were not tumbling down a long slope of hunger and desperation. As if trees still existed, and guitars grew on them. Madman!
In my mind’s eye, I killed Aimless right there, and I ate him. Aimless is even smaller and scrawnier than me, and oblivious to danger. I could kill him with my bare hands. In my mind I built a fire of his guitar, and roasted his flesh over it, and ate him. And I was warm and full and happy and alone, in my mind’s eye.
But I couldn’t really do that to my only friend.
Aimless ignored me. He just strummed the guitar, and sang a song to his girlfriend:
Gertie, baby sweetie,
Meet me by the shore,
Where nobody is wailin’
On the whales no more.
Open up your ocean,
Lead me to your deep,
Lay me in the cradle
Where the baby whales sleep.
We will swim into the sun,
We will dive into the sky,
We will float along the river
And we’re never gonna die.
I will hold you in my arms,
I will love you ’till I’m sore,
Oh Gertie, baby sweetie,
If you meet me by the shore.
“How are you going to hold a whale in your arms?” I had to ask.
Then Aimless stopped playing his guitar. He gazed at me, annoyed.
“Are you saying Gertie is fat?” he asked.
“Well, she’s a whale, isn’t she?”
He made no reply, except to return to strumming his guitar. It was clear he wasn’t going to eat that.
Eventually he said: “Yes, she’s a whale. But she’s special!”
Later we smoked some drugs and Aimless fell asleep on the cold cliffside. I was hungry, shuddering, confused and angry. And there lay Aimless’s guitar next to him, begging me to take it.
Love makes no sense to me. You can’t eat it, you can’t smoke it, you can’t burn it for fuel. I feel the dull warmth of my family ties, but family ties are provisional. Family is a courtesy that everyone extends because everyone so desperately needs the favor returned. When it’s time to feed Mrs. Teeth, family love weighs as much in one hand as one edible plastic door handle weighs in the other. Love is flimsy and disposable. It may be worth something, but not much.
I could never, ever fall in love with an imaginary whale.
But neither could I eat my friend’s guitar.
EXTREMELY BAD NEWS
I am doomed!
I always wondered how long I had to live, and now I know. I am definitely going to die, I can see it all coming now.
This morning I heard the news from my cousin Earwax, as we worked the trash pile together. He laughed when he told me, and poked me in my cough-wracked chest with his trash stick:
Mrs. Teeth has fallen in love with me!
Me!
Earwax laughed and laughed, until he folded over in a fit of wheezing. And then I spied Mrs. Teeth, far off over the bluff of trash. Just her huge head poked above the horizon, watching us, peering at me with her close-together eyes, and I knew this was no joke. Even at that distance I could see the passion burning in her like infection.
Why me? How did her mind settle on me? She ate her previous husband less than a month ago. How can she need another one so soon?
It’s only a matter of time now. I am doomed, doomed, doomed! I need to hide. I need to escape.
Ever since this morning she has been following me! She keeps her distance, for now, but I know she’ll be coming closer.
Probably she is carrying a present for me, probably some disgusting bouquet of my relatives’ bones. When she catches me she will blush, and then bashfully hand me these bony flowers, the fingers and toes of my cousins and uncles.
She will ask me if I like this, and if I tell the truth she will kill me.
She will ask me to hold her hand, and if I refuse, she will eat me.
That horrible madwoman will clutch my head with her huge grasping fingers and pull it towards her own, and ask me to kiss her on her diseased, toothy mouth! If I refuse, she’ll bite out my tongue! That is what love means to Mrs. Teeth!
And on top of all that, other bad news: a storm is brewing in Fat Heaven. That’s what Aimless told me when I went to visit him. He has been studying them through his telescope, and he says they’re angry. Some fat person has offended some other fat person, and they are all up there taking sides, getting ready to fight. Aimless says it has something to do with a spoiled romance.
This has happened before. The last time the fat people pummeled each other in the sky above us, they oozed blood and shit and vomit and useless consumer products for days and days. My cousin Snackables was swept up in the putrid gore and washed away to drown in the shit-dark sea, it fell so thick and slippery. Even our trash was contaminated with their bile and their blood. We had to dig for weeks to reach some relatively clean garbage. All because two floating fat men had to prove their relative worth to some floating fat woman in the sky.
Love! If the word Love had a head, I would stab it in the eye with my stick.
It’s so bad, this news, I can’t even think. I can only sit on the cliff next to Aimless, clutch my head, and listen to him babble while he plays his guitar.
Aimless says that there’s nothing to worry about. Aimless says everything will be fine, because Aimless is building a submarine. As soon as this submarine is ready, he says, the two of us can sail away into the shit-dark sea, thence to meet up with his whale girlfriend. “I think she has a sister,” he tells me, winking, while he strums the notes.
Aimless is insane, but I appreciate his willingness to help. I sit there beside him on the cliff, and listen to him sing his song to his whale, and for a moment I forget to worry. Foolish me.
Did you know that people in love are drawn to music? Yes, music attracts lovers like shit once attracted flies, before we ate all the flies.
Music now attracts Mrs. Teeth. Here she comes, shambling across the trash-mound toward us, shoving through the twisted scrap. I could run, but she would catch me. I could hide, but she would tear Aimless’s home apart looking for me, scatter his collections, sink his submarine. So I sink deep inside myself, perched there on the cliff, hiding
inside my own skin, waiting for the horror.
I never knew love could feel like this.
Mrs. Teeth tramples up behind us. “Such beautiful music!” she barks, clapping her hands in glee. Before either of us can react, she has grabbed Aimless’s guitar out of his hands and is shaking it upside-down, trying to dump the music out of the hole so she can eat it. Aimless grabs at the guitar and she slaps him to the ground with one meaty hand. She shakes it and shakes it, a dumb confused look on her face, but no edible musicians fall out of the guitar. Then, she holds it out to me.
“It’s a present,” she says. “I like you. Take it!”
I take it, and hand it back to Aimless.
“Now we’re friends!” she giggles. “Do you like that?”
I know it’s important to lie when answering this question, but I just don’t think I can do it. Honesty is my handicap. Honesty and my harelip. I want to say nothing, but I know Mrs. Teeth will reach down my throat with her ravaging hands and pull the truth up out of my belly if I don’t speak it.
“It’s a nice guitar,” I offer.
She reaches between my legs and grabs my genitals in one cold, clutching hand!
“Wanna be my boyfriend?” she asks, grinning. With her other hand she raises a hairy breast toward my face. A drop of saliva runs from the corner of her stinking mouth.
“Be my boyfriend and fuck me? Wanna?” she asks, leering.
I really don’t want to answer this question! But she leans over me, pushing her idiot lips at mine, squeezing me painfully. I go cross-eyed just looking into the beady eyes in her pinched-together face.
Just then, two things happen for which I will always be grateful.
First, there is a loud cracking clunk! Mrs. Teeth releases me and staggers to the side. Aimless has bopped her on her ugly head with his beautiful guitar! He strikes her again, and I hear the sound of wood preparing to crack. She screams with rage, and fixes Aimless’s tiny frame in her murderous eyes, grinding her disgusting teeth.
