The chairman of the Emergency Committee straightened his outlandishly fat polka-dot tie and nodded at me. He stood in the middle of a circle composed of concerned townspeople like myself. In an old classroom, we sat in scratched fold-up chairs discovered scattered on our front lawns, ones we otherwise might have thrown out.

After an introductory greeting and some exchange of pleasantries, I had raised the most pressing issue concerning what we could do about the dumping of garbage on our front lawns from nearby towns. Our town was small and farther from the city than any other. No one ever passed through to stop and visit.

A bald headed man with small spectacles raised his hand and pointed out that these nearby towns were also being used as garbage dumps from the city. With an annoying stammer, he said that the city’s private companies were sneaking garbage to unload in the middle of night. None of us asked him how he knew this or if he had secret connections.

“Whatever,” said a young divorcee, with a bulbous nose and overly stretched skin from a botched cosmetic surgery. “It’s getting to be too much.”

She then described how her front lawn was filled with rusted bicycle parts, engine scraps, worn gaskets and gears, rig-sized tires, crumpled cereal boxes, syringes, egg shells, Russian dolls smeared with blood, plastic hands with fingers ripped off, notebooks and diaries with pages torn.

“Why, I can’t even see past my lawn anymore!”

The bald headed man agreed. “If this continues, we won’t be able to see the sky,” he said.

The Fire Chief of our town stood up and, in a gravelly voice, proposed that taxes be raised to invest in a giant incinerator. He then discussed cost, kinds of materials, and what hazards this might entail. A couple of us smiled at each other. He was notorious for getting high and going to meetings with glassy eyes.

The town’s comptroller spoke out. “No,” he said. “This would introduce another source of pollution and expose us to the possibility of toxic gases. Not to mention the cost. Why should we pay for the negligence of others?”

There was some banter going in the back of the room. It was beginning to turn hot and I found myself looking at the clock on the wall, very much like the one in P.S. 98 that I watched as a youth when summer days approached. I would multiply seconds in my head until they constituted a ticking universe that was circular and constantly stretching towards Omega.

I wondered if that clock was also once a piece of discarded junk that someone had salvaged.

The chairman paced back and forth in the middle of the circle, hands in his pocket, head down, giving courteous consideration to all suggestions.

A husky but brain-injured war veteran threw out the notion of everyone digging tunnels, building a nexus of them, until they reached the underground centers of nearby towns. Perhaps even the city. We would fill these tunnels with the debris and refuse found on our front lawns.

This suggestion was unanimously vetoed for many reasons, not the least of which was the thought of these tunnels becoming backed up, of living over islands of debris, passageways festering with garbage and rats. How could we sleep at night with the thought of those plastic limbs or discarded metal teeth pressing against our floors, a zombie-like presence beneath our beds?

Finally, a retired English professor who worked part-time as a librarian, a woman whom we all loved but whose ideas we never took seriously, spoke in her usual shaky voice. She had recently published a memoir in which she claimed she was once part of a traveling circus before becoming a poet. She had written in agonizing detail about two clowns she fell in love with as a young and utterly charmed girl. Both clowns, I assumed, were long dead.

“Mr. Chairman. I propose we build a gigantic canvas over our town. We will work at this day and night on scaffolds and stepladders. We will hang bright lights so we will never know darkness. When completed, it will foster a stronger sense of what we can achieve by teamwork. And if those garbage trucks come in the night, if they burst through our simple but joyous circus, I will take a match and set fire to our enormous tent, the way I once did to those jesters who tricked me into loving them. After their deaths, I no longer felt ugly and used. . . We will turn into the sky‘s most beautiful refuse, drifting over the city like ghosts, causing our smug bedfellows below a sense of eternal guilt.”

The room fell silent. You could hear a ghost dying.

The chairman of the committee cleared his throat and thanked all of us for coming. He instructed us to jot down any ideas for alternative solutions. We filed out. No one stopped to chat. No one looked at the librarian.

I woke up somewhere in the middle of the night. I wandered outside my apartment and walked down the main street that always ran east to west. I had this vague urge to explore, to walk past our town‘s boundaries, which I heard, resembled a triangle. I always walked in a jagged line. I had this superstition about straight ones.

I found the old librarian standing in the middle of the street, a queer smile spread across her face, looking up at the stars, holding a single matchstick. It was a large match, the kind used in relighting an oven’s pilot light. The garbage trucks never did arrive that night.

But I could now smell something burning, strong at first, then drifting outward. Perhaps it was our own flesh, the inhabitants of this outlier. As if we could step outside ourselves–our bodies, displaced, smoldering offers of offal–the way the upstream fisher kings would want it.  And whatever remained of us after the smoke would be painless, invisible, pure.

—

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. His work has been published in Aphelion, Abyss and Apex, Nite Blade, The Horror Zine, Why Vandalism, and others.