The Boy from the Burning Mountain

Some kids call this a landfill but I call it home.

In my dreams, it’s mostly green: grass dancing beneath the mountains of the Tien-Shan, each blade brushed by a crisp breeze. Laughter crossed the fields, though I couldn’t remember why, or whose it was. Somewhere nearby, a pen and paper waited in the grass, untouched.

Then the wind shifted, and everything smelled wrong. The green faded into something burning underneath it, each blade disappearing into a brief flicker of smoke. I told myself it was nothing. The ground then turned sour with the smell of rotting things, till the air tasted of something not right. I clawed for the book, fingers just brushing the paper...

“Sherzod… Sherzod…”

I held tight to the dream, already slipping under her voice.

“Sherzod! It’s time to get up, we have much to do…” Her voice soft yet commanding in a motherly sort of way, dishes rattling in the sink as she scraped last night’s pot in a rhythm that revealed her mood.

“Alright, alright… I am up,” I said lazily, laying there longer than I should, coughing due to the haze in the air. I could hear the tarps on our tent battering against the wind as I felt her eyes burrow into me. I sat up, grabbed my notebook, and jotted whatever came to mind.

“Sherzod, there is no time for that penciling, we need you out there… Books are for school, not for fields.”

I said nothing in reply, which I know was the most effective form of irritation.

She gave me that look.

“Mom… it is the last day of school, and a half-day even at that. I will have all summer… Just let me go today?”

“Fine… today. But we need you out there…” she said in a way that told me she agreed.

I took the long way, like always, a wide, looping detour to hide where I come from. If I took the direct road, people would see the smoke rising behind me. Yet I know how vain that is. The stench is already in my chest, my hair, my clothes. I don’t want them to know, though I think they do.

Some kids grow up in homes of concrete, wood, or brick: lush backyards, air crisp in their lungs. That is not my story. That is not my future. The burning mountain had risen the way mountains do, slowly, without permission.

I once saw a picture of Mordor in a book and thought: this is it.

From its smoldering depths, smoke seeps upward like steam from a pot, as if the ground itself were boiling. Beneath it all, methane, so they call it, rises through the waste, thick enough to choke the sky. Black. It burns my lungs.

My dad left about a year ago to find work. We have not heard from him since, though my mother thinks he started another family, since he stopped sending money home. Now it’s just me and my mother. Most mornings, my mom fights back tears over breakfast, tending the tandoor. She makes good naan.

Peering out of our makeshift home, we can see the mountain clearly. It begins a few hundred meters away. It’s not stone but accumulation, an abundance of waste the earth could no longer digest. Its skin is torn plastic and broken containers, the dull shine of things once new, cast aside, risen to heights no one intended. Only countless black birds circled above it.

I headed for the highway, books pressed to my side. I dreaded the last day of school, not the classes, but the season that followed. Summer meant the fields. We searched for metals, building materials, anything of value.

“Sherzod!” A loud, familiar voice from behind. I kept walking, hoping he’d get bored. No luck.

He stepped in front of me, two others flanking him, laughing. “You’re a tandoori oven reeking of burnt trash. Now I know where you live, and what do you have to say for yourself?” This had happened before at school, but never so close to home.

Azamat placed a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and said, “For all intensive purposes, you live in a dump, stupid, don’t act surprised.”

I could not help myself. “It’s… intents, not intensive,” I said, the words already out before I'd thought them through. Then I decided to dig in. “Intents and purposes. So what were you saying to me? I found it hard to understand.”

The look on his face was worth the beating I received.

I had worse. Nothing but a busted-up lip. The hardest thing was my notebook of poems and stories. They trampled it and tossed it into the road. I was able to retrieve it, but it had been run over a few times.

Last day of school. It still beats being in the fields.

****

Summer vacation simply meant the fields of waste. I grabbed my notebook, its cover stitched back together, and headed toward my cousin Ruslan's tent just beyond ours. I jotted a few lines anyway, stealing one last moment before the day claimed me.

“Ruslan, come on, let’s go!” I yelled.

He came out groggy and annoyed, pickax in hand, and tossed one over to me.

“It’s too hot…” Ruslan whined. “And do you know if it’s a plastic day or a metal one?”

“Metal,” I said. “Should burn our hands up really good. But the pay is better.”

The ground sank beneath our feet, a sludge of unknown substances mingled with earth. We waded through more than a kilometer of discarded things. The sun was ruthless. By lunch our throats were scorched with thirst, our eyes stung with smoke, our bodies slick with the grease of everything around us. In a torn plastic bag, half-buried, I found a book of short stories and poems, worn, but whole. I’d gathered a small collection of these over the years. I checked around before slipping it into the bag on my back.

The city had cut our water off days ago. No shade in sight. Mothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, grandparents, all of us out here “harvesting” whatever we could find. Thousands of us, spread across the landfill. I pulled out my notebook and started writing anyway.

Ruslan glanced over, annoyed. “What good thing could you be writing out here?”

“Nothing,” I said, closing it before he could see.

Later, walking back through the sludge, my vision blurred. I think I’d have gone down if Ruslan hadn’t caught me. Nearby, Sultan — a neighbor — saw the state I was in and pressed watermelon into my hands, water too. He never said much. It was part of why people listened when he did.

****

My notebook of stories filled up slowly as summer finally loosened its grip. I took the people around me, neighbors, cousins, strangers on the landfill, and placed them in a world that wasn’t burning. School had started again, and I was relieved to be anywhere but the fields. Ruslan and I were lying on the tushok, its fabric stained black from the coal that seeped out of the heater we’d built from scrap.

“Ruslan! Ruslan!” A little voice came running toward him. Nargiza tripped, stumbling to the ground, face red, eyes swollen with tears. “Papa. It’s Papa,” was all she could say between sobs that shook her whole body.

We both jumped up. I grabbed Nargiza and held her as the cold air slapped us in the face the moment we stepped outside.

Ruslan’s father, Timur, could be heard in the distance, drunk again. He spent the summer building a shack to replace their tent, but the bottle had stopped him from ever finishing it.

Inside, he stood holding a window, hammer in hand, swaying as he tried in vain to install it. A nail slipped from his fingers and disappeared into the snow already gathering on the floor. The wind tore through the half-built wall behind him. In the corner, Ruslan’s mother sat sobbing, her arms wrapped around herself.

“Papa, please…” Ruslan said with caution, knowing the capriciousness of his inflamed temperament.

“It goes like this, son… You place it here, on this edge, you see? Grab me that nail,” Timur demanded, his voice too loud for the small space.

“Here,” Ruslan said. “How about you instruct me… papa… and I secure it in?”

For a moment, Timur went still. I thought — we all thought — he might actually hand it over.

Then he looked at his son, waved his hand, and muttered, “Foo…you know nothing!” He growled.

He swayed, caught himself against the frame, and lifted the hammer again. The first strike missed the nail and found the glass instead. We could hear the glass shatter, pieces falling on the floor.

Still he hammered. Frame splintering, wood shrieking against wood, until the window was nailed in crooked, gaping, and glassless.

“Ungrateful,” he screamed, and walked out into the snow without his coat. Screaming at the world and everything around him.

No one went after him. He would be back in the morning.

Ruslan’s mother hadn’t moved from the corner the entire time. Now she finally did, crossing the room, to place blankets and clothes over it.

Neighbors started showing up from the commotion. No one asked what happened. They already knew. They helped us clean the glass from the floor, tarp off the hole where a window should have been. I watched the busy hands make that little shack whole again.

I laid my pen down, looking out at the shattered glass. I felt something deep, unsure of what I’d just witnessed. The haze painted the horizon, smoke blurring the line between decay and air, the same way I felt inside.

I sat there a while, listening to the wind batter the tarp above us. No one had gone after Timur, even though the room was full of people helping. Even his own family. I do not blame him. I’d rather not see him again, honestly.

I was outside before I decided to be.

The snow was coming down fast and visibility was very unclear. I decided to walk a little distance to just sooth my thoughts. There he was in the distance, passed out in the cold, on the frozen landfill floor, was Timur. “Ruslan!” I yelled, though I wasn’t sure yet that he could hear me, and it had already been about an hour and his hands looked like they were blackened from frostbite.

He was heavier than I expected, or I was weaker than I thought. Dragging him felt like dragging something already gone. I pulled him as far as a tent I didn’t recognize. I didn’t care who lived there. I only needed a door between him and the cold.

The pallet door collapsed as I fell inside with him. An old woman sat in the corner. One look was enough. She reached into a small tin and pulled out a slab of sheep fat, rubbing it into his hands.

“I can smell him, son,” she said. “Is he your father?”

“No. My cousin’s,” I said. “We need to get him to a hospital.”

She let out an involuntary chuckle, as if I’d said something foolish. “Ambulances don’t come to this part of the city. You know that. We’re off the grid.” She paused, studying his face. “Timur. Yes. I recognize him. Poor soul — he isn’t even registered here.”

The weight of it settled in her expression before it reached mine.

“The only clinic that takes the unregistered,” she said quietly, “they don’t heal. They amputate. Even when it isn’t needed.”

I felt sick. “Then what do we do?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“We keep him here,” she said. “We decide in the morning. He can stay here, and you can call me Nadia.”

I ran to get Ruslan.

****

Nargiza was only five. She stood outside her shack holding a plastic bag up to the wind, letting it billow like a kite. The rattling sound seemed to hold her — she just watched it sway and twist in the wind. Tear tracks still clung to her cheeks. She had no idea her father was fighting for his life only a few steps away. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

I pulled Ruslan and his mother aside and whispered the situation. She gave a small nod, more blessing than permission, and we left to tend to him.

Timur lay on the floor, his eyes beginning to flutter open, his face twisting as pain tore through him. His body shuddered, small convulsions rippling beneath his skin.

“There are no good options,” Nadia said quietly. “Let’s see how he responds. Maybe he’ll get some color back in his hands. If not, we’ll need to find a car.”

We sat by her coal heater, listening to it crackle while Timur whispered to things we could not see.

I reached for my notebook, feeling as though the pencil in my hand carried the weight of the world. There was nowhere left to take him. So I wrote him somewhere else.

Bottles of broken dreams,

drunk till their veins turn green.

He walks the world upright,

breathing dust, his only birthright.

Trash of another man’s greed

has become his only mead.

He wanders on, hollowed out,

drawn tighter than a noose,

a soul the world cut loose.

Let your hands remember goodness.

Let them remember love.

And let there be a field for you yet.

I hadn’t even finished the last line when Nadia’s voice cut through the quiet. “He feels very hot,” she said. “We can’t keep him here.” The look on her face told us what we needed to do.

Ruslan and I grabbed our coats and ran the 3.5 kilometers to the nearest highway. Only a few cars passed at that hour. We waved down every set of headlights we saw. After a long while, an old black Zhiguli rattled to a stop, the whole frame shaking like it might fall apart before it ever came to rest.

“We have money, sir,” Ruslan said, breathless. “We just need you to come with us.”

We explained the situation, the urgency, and he studied us for a long moment. “Keep the money,” he said. “Just show me where to go and I will take you. You have all suffered enough.”

At the clinic, it took hours to finish the paperwork and pay what they called a fee. They amputated both his hands. He stayed there a few days, then took the bus home alone.

He didn’t speak on the walk back from the bus stop. I saw it on his face, the way he kept looking down at his arms. A man who built things with his hands had just understood there would be no more building.

****

In the days that followed, life felt heavy. Outside, I could hear Nargiza and her friend giggling as they swung a broken mop‑head against a mattress. She had been so worried, cried every time she saw her papa. I don’t know what made me ask, but the words came anyway. “Would you like to hear a story?”

Nargiza’s eyes lit up, hungry for any distraction at all. “Yes — you have one?”

Dozens, actually. I’d been hiding them for months: pages and pages, written when no one was watching. I already knew which one she’d love.

We walked to the outdoor kitchen. So I began: a girl and her horse, riding the lush green steppes with wind in her hair, who outran every wild beast that crossed her path. Villages knew she was near before they ever saw her — by the thunder of hooves, by the dust her tireless stallion kicked into the sky. A legend, she was. And her name, can you guess?

“Nargiza,” I whispered.

The next day, Nargiza brought two cousins. The day after, three more came, sitting cross-legged on the dusty ground before I’d even arrived. Each one wanted a turn inside a story of their own, and I gave it to them: a name slipped into a sentence, Aigul who tamed the wind, Ibek who conquered the dragon. By the end of the week I couldn’t fit them all inside — they spilled past the tarp, some standing just to hear over the others’ heads. I had no idea how it had started.

My mother even laid two new notebooks by my mattress. She'd started coming, when she could.

One day Sultan came by, smiling. He looked at the children spilling past the tarp, then at me, and nodded once, like he’d settled something in his own mind.

“You should do this properly,” he said. “Not just whenever you happen to come by. There’s an abandoned house not far from here. Make it into something.”

I felt the stories that lived inside me finally given the breath of life.

"Yes," I said, and for the first time, I let myself believe it.

Timur came one evening, weeks later. He didn’t speak. He sat near the back, sleeves hanging loose over where his hands used to be. Nargiza didn’t notice him at first, too busy waiting for the part where the older girl caught a golden eagle. When she did, she walked over and laid her head on his shoulder. Timur could only smile.

He came back the next week, and the one after that. He couldn’t hammer anymore, or hold a nail, but he could carry books in a sack slung over his shoulder, and he did, gathering whatever the landfill hadn’t burned, hauling them to the house Sultan gave us. We turned it into something like a library. Every evening, just after the light went, our kids traveled to places they’d never heard of — laughter, giggling, a whole lot of fidgeting — while the mountain and the ground burned on, same as always, black smoke still curling up to the heavens.