A Wish for The Wasted

The compactor jamming was not a new issue for Maureen. She had been the waste auditor for the Brick Kiln Road municipal landfill for a decade. It was a weekly occurrence that someone snuck something they shouldn’t have into their trash. Usually, it was garden hoses or long lengths of wire that got wrapped around the gears, or metal pipes got pinned between the crushers, triggering an automatic emergency shutdown.

The familiar whine of hydraulics stressing against something refusing to be crushed filled the relative quiet of the night. Maureen could easily have snuck her husband's possessions into the thousands of pounds of bulk household trash she handled each day during one of her regular shifts, but she felt it was more respectful to get rid of his things herself, without the background hustle and bustle of a busy dump day. She killed the power to the compactor and climbed into the hopper with a flashlight between her teeth.

John’s coat sat outside of three split trash bags of his belongings that she had just packed up that morning. The bags sat on top of a mountain of trash smashed into the hopper and still contained his shoes, some of his books, a half-full shampoo bottle, and various other things that filled up the volume of John’s daily life. He had died eight months ago, and Maureen only just recently came to the realization that preserving his trash was not the same as preserving him as a person.

Her flashlight landed on a small tooth with a pink thread of nerve wrapped around one of John’s coat buttons. She didn’t think it belonged to John because, even though he was wearing this coat when he died, his death had left him relatively intact. When she reached out and touched the tooth, the nerve released from the button and curled around her finger. She violently shook it off, and it flung deep into the abyss of refuse below her.

All of the garbage under her seemed to move with one great coordinated ragged inhalation, like black, cancer-ridden lungs. Something seemed to be moving random bits of trash and pooling them together a few feet away from her. Bottles rolled towards each other, phones with cracked screens pulled together, dozens of mismatched single shoes collected and organized themselves. All of it formed the rough, vague shape of a woman as she sat up out of the trash. Overlapping receipts made her face look like a tattooed, white, scaled lizard. Two mismatched black screens of broken cell phones blinked where eyes should be.

“Maureen,” it spoke with a voice that sounded like hundreds of unread voicemails.

Her first instinct was to run. To jump out of the hopper and then dump gasoline into the compactor, light it, and burn whatever this abomination was before. Instead, she asked, “How do you know my name?”

“You have contributed to me many times. I hear the others address you.” It had fingers made out of syringes and chicken bones that were gently caressing John’s coat. “This cannot be processed. You discarded it before you were ready to relinquish it.”

“Then…” Maureen’s voice shook, “...just give it back?” She didn’t mean to make it sound like a question, but she couldn’t control the pitch in her voice.

“Nothing given here is taken back.” The creature opened its chest and spread it sickeningly wide. Inside, a mass of shimmering pennies glimmered in dirty, pitch-black water. It looked like the bottom of some bizarre fountain had compressed millions of coins together as if the repeated act of wishing for something created enough pressure for a long enough time to evolve into an organ.

“I am Remainder,” its head lulled off the side of its impossibly open chest cavity, and its dead black screen eyes bore down on Maureen. “This place holds too many discarded but not forgotten things. So much unresolved matter has awakened me. Your John has caused an accumulation of too much for me to negotiate. There must be a discharge of this energy, or you and your kind will deal with unmanageable instabilities.”

“Are you telling me that…” Maureen laughed nervously despite herself, “... I need to make a wish? That will discharge this, or whatever?”

“Yes. You may choose its shape.”

Maureen thought about John. At forty three years old, facedown beside the kitchen counter while coffee burned in the pot. She thought about the garden he bought all the supplies for and never got to plant, the vacations they both postponed, the old man she saw herself with, whom he had hopelessly failed to become. She thought of all of the half-finished things they had together, and she tried to imagine all of the potential versions of him that death had prevented. His last text still lived in her phone, unread: “Don’t wait up.”

“Ok. I wish nothing were ever wasted ever again.” Maureen felt a chill move through her, a sharp contrast to the decomposition heat rising from the depth of the compactor.

“Nothing?” The receipts covering Remainder’s mouth fluttered.

“Nothing.”

#

For the first three days, the news coined the term The Great Restoration. Landfills emptied out, surplus food vanished from dumpsters and appeared on bare kitchen tables, heat that fled from tall smokestacks somehow then found its way to cold houses, expired blood in cold storage facilities miraculously uncoagulated and became usable again. A constant cycle of politicians congratulating themselves for their policy victories appeared on every channel.

#

On the fourth day, Maureen’s neighbor had a dining room chair that wouldn’t let her go anywhere. Mrs. Hewitt lived alone, but owned four dining room chairs. Three of them disappeared one night. The final chair appeared to determine that remaining empty between meals was too wasteful. Its wooden arms had bent around Mrs. Hewitt’s ribs. By the time Maureen heard her screaming from next door and went to check on her, the arms had branched off and sunk deep into her skin, searching for more substantial anchor points. Maureen ran home and grabbed John’s reciprocating saw. The severed pieces of the chair twitched on the carpet and crawled after Mrs. Hewitt until they started a fire in the backyard and burned the whole thing. The news cycle that night shifted into a constant cycle of politicians blaming the opposing party and their rivals' poor policy decisions for whatever was happening.

#

The next morning was when unused and unsaid words started coming out of people’s bodies. Millions of people cried out withheld apologies from inflamed tear ducts, the small, translucent bubbles bursting to expel the sound of sorries that should have already been spoken aloud. Maureen watched a video online from a hospital two states over that showed newborn babies screaming the words of past suicide notes that one or both of their parents had written and deleted.

At the supermarket, as Maureen passed a freezer door, something inside whispered, “Don’t wait up.” She flung every door in the aisle open. All she was met with were packages of various meats, trembling slightly under the fluorescent lights. When she opened the final door, the word “John?” escaped her lips before she could hold it back. She was met with fifty bags of plastic-wrapped tongues, thrashing with frostbite against the inside of the plastic. In fifty different voices, they responded to her all at once.

“Don’t wait up.”

#

After all the wasted words had been spent, the organs came next. Over the next few days, humanity learned just how drastically inefficient the human body was.

A man in an Ohio hospital lost a kidney in his sleep. A security camera in the bedroom of his apartment showed the organ pressing against the inside of his abdomen. The skin stretched into a dark red blister. It traveled upwards, sliding rib by rib, until it finally forced itself out of his mouth. He lived just long enough to watch it drag itself out of his bedroom, dragging a thin, ropey ureter behind it. It reached a woman two rooms away who was dying of renal failure. Security footage from her room showed her sleeping on her side as the kidney climbed the hospital bed and approached her lower back. The skin above her hips opened like lips anticipating a deep kiss as the kidney crawled inside.

Eyes loosened in the heads of people who didn't read and who never looked at anything beautiful. Muscle peeled from the bones of the lazy in long wet ribbons to slither away and vanish into the limbs of exhausted, atrophied strangers. Nothing could remain unused merely because it belonged to and was connected to someone. Humans had lost that ability to choose.

#

By the second week, people started cramming every opening in their bodies with gauze. Unsurprisingly, the body just started inventing new openings. The landfill had to lay off most of the staff since there was no more waste. On one of the last days it was open, Maureen found her coworker Luiz collapsed next to one of the conveyors that used to help sort heavy metal waste. He lay on his back, holding both of his hands over his face in tight, rigid claws. He was sweating profusely and crying.

His throat moved in a harsh, forceful gulp. “I haven’t painted since college,” he said.

Maureen looked more closely at his hands and realized his fingers were shortening. His nails slid backward and disappeared beneath the cuticles. The knuckles in his hands sank, one after another, as it looked like something traveled up and down his arms underneath the skin. Luiz screamed as both hands collapsed like limp, empty gloves. Across town, a woman woke up with ten new fingers growing from her wrists and hands. Later that day, she painted a mural on the side of the town courthouse. Luiz saw it and recognized the style on his way home from the hospital. He stared at it and cried again as the taxi drove him home.

#

A day later, strangers began to remember Maureen's husband. An old man said he was at John’s forty-first birthday party that never happened. Mrs. Hewitt swore one of John’s teeth was growing in her mouth. That evening, a naked man came to her door to show her that he had carved the exact pattern of John’s index fingerprint in bloody spirals on his torso.

“Mare,” he said, using John's private nickname. “I knew you’d wait.”

Maureen slammed the door. The naked man pushed his fingertips into the door frame so hard that he was able to smash his fingers between the space of the closed door. Skin like small pale worms wriggled and crawled through the gap. He eventually ran away from the house, happily waving his hands and mangled fingers above his head.

#

By the next day, faces were rarely remaining on the people born with them. Features were migrated from one person to another as needed. Multiple beautiful mouths sprouted from talented public speakers as therapists sprouted flowing rows of ears down their necks. A blind woman refused so many eyes that they started placing themselves along the column of her vertebrae. Dying people became young in short bursts, as infants aged drastically when no one was watching them. People started speaking with the voices of the dead while forgetting their own names because a name used by only one person had become an indefensible luxury. The word “I” started to disappear completely from conversation.

Locks stopped working. Empty rooms were wasted space, and privacy was unused, unshared knowledge. Skin became only a wall for keeping useful material from reaching someone else.

#

Twenty-seven days after her conversation with Remainder, John came home. He arrived among forty-two different people walking shoulder to shoulder. Some were kids, some looked like they were dying, and many of them had no skin below the neck. Exposed muscles joined together, red fibers extending from one body to another and knitting into the next person. Ribs opened outwards; some were interlocked with others. Some arms entered neighboring mouths up to the elbow. Eyes rolled from sockets, across shoulders and arms, traveling along connected flesh, providing different perspectives of Maureen for all forty-two people to see. They formed a giant half-circle around the porch, like one giant organ trying to remember the shape of the man it used to be inside of.

“Mare,” every mouth said at once.

Maureen's first reaction was to run into the middle of the mass of bodies and embrace. That was the worst part of grief. Jumping into the open maw of the worst horrors you could imagine to maybe get a second of relief, to maybe be consumed by this thing and become a shambling, mindless part of it seemed a better option than living alone with the pain.

“Are you John?” Maureen asked.

The bodies considered this for a moment. A little boy near the middle of them leaned forward out of the mass, and his skull softened. An older woman pressed her free hand through his head and molded the skin and the bones of his face until he resembled John enough for Maureen to recognize him.

“Parts of us remember being John,” every mouth spoke.

“Did you still love me at the end?” A single tear rolled down her cheek.

Every mouth smiled with mismatched teeth. “Everyone loves you now.”

It lunged for her. About a dozen arms separated tendons, stretching and scratching the air with skinless hands. She stepped back and got the impression it was reaching for openings in her body to connect to the rest of the mass. The John-thing began to cry from forty-two different mouths.

“You didn’t bring me back!” It screamed. “You gave me away!”

Maureen slammed the door and sprinted into the kitchen to get her car keys. She drove her SUV through the garage door as the mass turned to chase her out of the driveway. Several of the arms latched onto her car. She sped up, and the mass struggled to hang on as they were dragged down the street, shedding people off in rolling bloody heaps. The bulk of the John-things mass fell completely off a couple of miles from the landfill.

Remainder was still inside the almost empty compactor. It was much smaller now, as most of its body had been reassigned for less wasteful purposes.

“Take it back,” Maureen yelled as she crawled into the compactor and became acutely aware of the bags full of John’s things still inside.

“Nothing can be taken back. Only completed.” Remainder stared at Maureen with its dead screen eyes. “Name a thing. A thing that can be wasted completely. Nothing that can be reused or preserved as some kind of reminder or lesson. Not something that can be transformed into art, memory, or caution. What will you waste?”

“Pain.” Maureen offered without thinking.

“Pain becomes wisdom and growth. That’s impossible to get rid of.”

“Failure?”

“Failure ultimately becomes instruction. It is too useful to go away.”

“Grief.”

“You use grief every day as an excuse to keep your husband working for you; grief can never be cured or corrected. Do you never want to compare the love you had for him to anything else? It could have been the greatest thing you’ve ever known. If that association goes away, if the greatest loss becomes unfeelable, what left will be good?” Remainder’s words sounded eerily human and pleading to Maureen.

Behind her, the top of the compactor was all of a sudden enveloped by the bodies of the John-thing. It scooped up all of the injured parts of itself, and now they were all too integrated to distinguish or count. Torsos opened into one another, spines braided together, hands clung all around the edges of the compactor above her as John's face surfaced again and angina from the meat of the thing above her. Sometimes John was young. Other times, he was an old man in his seventies and eighties. John’s he was and John’s he’d never become. The living nightmare before her made her understand what Remainder was asking for.

“His future. His future is wasted completely.” Maureen hung her head as she spoke.

The writhing mass above her recoiled violently.

“The garden he never planted, the daughter we talked about and never had, the trip we never took to Iceland.” She choked out her words through tears as the thing screamed above her. Like the act of her mentioning possibilities and letting go of each one was a new stab wound to its vital parts. Bodies fell off and smashed to the floor. Organs tore loose from their hosts and fluttered around in confused, anxious circles before dissolving into blood. Faces sagged from skulls like melting candles and wet masks.

“He was forty-three when he died,” Maureen said as she looked up a Remainder. “Nothing after that will ever be his.”

She looked up at the last part of the mass hanging over the edge of the compactor, and the realest version of John she had seen so far looked back at her.

“Mare,” it said in exactly the gentle way he whispered to her. “Don’t wait up.” It slid off the top of the compactor and fell to the ground outside of it with a wet thud.

Maureen climbed out of the compactor and turned its main power source back on. As the compactor descended on the last remaining of his belongings, she pulled her phone out and looked at his last message. “Don’t wait up.” She deleted it as his coat was crushed in the hopper. His shoes pressed into his shampoo bottle, and its remaining contents exploded all over his thinning books. Glass was powdered, plastic split, and she watched his coat disappear into a ton of ordinary human waste. His voice didn’t rise out of the trash; Reclaimer didn’t have a parting message. She just stood there quietly and watched as meaningful things got lost.