Category: Swamp things

On this slow afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s, Brad was bored. When a stylish woman came through the automatic doors and headed toward the barbeque gas grills, Brad stopped leaning on the paint counter and followed, hot on her trail.

From behind she looked pretty good, for a woman no longer young but not yet middle-aged. Younger than his ex, he guessed. He admired her trim figure and wondered if she dated older men.

Brad smoothed his orange apron and trailed in her wake. Chances are good I’ll make quota, he thought. He prided himself on his customer service skills, honed over many years working at Lind’s Home Base. He could sell lumber and nails to any contractor who walked through the door, no matter what language they spoke. For the ladies, he knew just what kind of carpet they would order or what size plastic bin they would choose to store their leftover Christmas decorations. I bet you’d like a green lid, he would guess, and they always flirted back, especially the over-sixty crowd.

Brad was a little surprised when the customer walked past the barbeques and garden implements without a glance, aiming for the wall of repellents. Aha, he guessed. She had some critters eating up her aloe vera plants. She stopped and stared up at the wall of plastic bottles, cans, traps, sprays, and devices designed to repel various unwanted pests.

Brad stopped behind her. “Happy new year, Miss, help you find something?”

The woman turned. Brad felt skewered by blue eyes and an expression he could not decipher. Was she angry, or was she scared? He had a sneaking hunch he knew what she was looking for, but he wanted to avoid bringing up any sensitive subjects. People didn’t wander the repellent aisle for entertainment.

“Let me guess, say no more, trouble with moles, am I right?”

She stared at him a long moment before responding. “Well, no, no moles. I live in an apartment. No garden.” She turned back to peruse the wall of poisons in front of her.

Brad smacked his head. “No, say it isn’t so! Roaches? That’s the pits, but so common here in desert apartment buildings. Almost impossible to get rid of entirely without going nuclear. But this spray is the next best thing. Works for three months, no odor, safe for pets.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “No trouble with cockroaches, uh, Brad . . . at least not of the nonhuman kind. Or mice. Or flies. Let’s see, what else? I currently seem to be safe from mosquitoes. No trouble with deer eating my lettuce or cats peeing in my cabbages. Lucky me. No, I’m looking for something in particular. . . . There. That’s it. Something like that.”

Brad squinted at the silver spray cans at the end of the aisle.

“Oh, these? A very new product line, not sure how well they work, to be honest. Very expensive, possibly toxic.”

“Nothing could be more toxic than the creep I want to use it on,” the woman said. She pointed at a can on the highest shelf. “That one, please. Can you reach it?”

Brad stretched and brought it down to eye level. He read the product name out loud. “Creep Repellent. For use on current and former spouses and partners. Are you sure this is what you want?”

The customer nodded. “Quite sure. As long as it is not lethal. I don’t want to kill him. I just want him to leave me alone. This should do the trick, along with all the other tactics I have deployed. Boric acid. Patchouli incense. Tofu. Feminine hygiene products in plain view. Let me see the instructions. So . . . it says I should spray this around all entrances to my apartment. Oh, and my car as well. Right, that makes sense.”

“I’ve seen the TV commercials,” Brad admitted. “Well, when I’m not fastforwarding through them. I mean, I gave up cable, too expensive.

The woman gave him a genuine smile. She had nice even white teeth. Brad felt a little surge of hope. He took a step closer. She backed up and took the cap off the spray can.

“Shall we test it out?” she said, holding the can up with her finger on the button.

Brad backed away with a polite cough. “I hope he gets the message.”

“He will. And if that doesn’t work, I have my new best friend with me, locked and loaded at all times.” She patted her purse.

“Self-checkout is over that way.”

“A disturbance has been reported outside the University Hospital,” the TV news anchor said. “Let’s go to our reporter on the street, Bob Smeeton. Bob, what can you tell us?”

“Well, Duane, it appears that a crowd of about fifty people, mostly women, have kidnapped all the doctors in the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department and marched them outside to the quad, where if you look behind me, you can see a large trampoline has been set up on the grass.”

“Yeah, we can see a trampoline,” Duane said. “What is going on?”

“It seems that these are patients who are apparently not satisfied with the care provided by the ENT doctors on staff here at Uni Hospital. Let me see if I can get close enough to interview someone. Miss! Miss! Bob Smeeton, Channel 6 News Live at Five on Your Side Keeping you Safe in our Communities Day and Night, find us at KBUP dash TV dotcom, Miss, can you tell us what is happening here? Why are these people rioting?”

“We’re aren’t rioting,” said the middle-aged woman Bob had cornered. “We are helping our doctors understand our situation.”

“By making them jump on a trampoline,” Bob laughed. “Whoa, back off, don’t touch the talent!”

“Listen, Bob, those voices you hear are people who are frustrated with not having been heard. Our doctors look at us and say, you look fine, so you must be fine. But they don’t understand what it’s like to be in our shoes. So we are helping them understand.”

“I don’t understand, what is the malady, can you explain?”

“It’s vestibular, Bob,” the woman snarled. “We have disorders that make us feel like the room is spinning around us, we fall on the floor and vomit, we are bedridden for days, some of us feel as if we are on a rocking boat or a trampoline [gestures], we can’t get our balance, we sometimes faint for no reason, we can’t look up or down or roll over in bed without feeling like the floor is dropping out from under us. We can’t take care of ourselves or our families, Bob, we can’t work, we can’t exercise, without paying a price, and some of can’t sleep. We’ve lost people to suicide, Bob, because they just can’t take it anymore. And these are young people, Bob, with their lives ahead of them, realizing that their lives are ruined.”

“Can’t doctors do anything?”

“Oh, sure! They pull out their medical textbooks and diagnose us with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or they get really fancy and call it persistent postural perceptual dizziness, or if they can’t be bothered to explore further, they just lump us into the most convenient category of all, vestibular migraines.”

“Whew, those are some mighty big words for a little person like you. Whoa, stand down, sorry, didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Bob, in your defense and in defense of the doctors, the main culprit is lack of interest. Doctors are untrained, because vestibular research is scarce, they don’t learn much about vestibular disorders in med school, but they don’t want to look stupid, so they make up a diagnosis and send us to PT.”

“PT?”

“Physical therapy for our vestibular systems, to retrain our brains to work with our eyes, ears, and spines.”

“So, what is happening to these doctors here? The patients are making them jump on the trampoline. Oh, one guy just fell off the edge. Oh, now he’s back, they just tossed him back onto the trampoline.”

“Bob? Bob? Can you hear me? It’s Duane in the studio, see if you can move in a little closer with the camera.”

“Okay, Duane. Now you can see better over my shoulder, there’s quite a crowd of women and they seem to be pretty angry. They’ve tossed about ten people on the trampoline, all men, looks like, and they aren’t letting them get down. Every time one of the men gets a leg off the thing, the crowd tosses him back. These poor guys are really getting bounced around. They keep falling over. Looks like one guy lost his glances. Whoops, there’s a dude, appears to be vomiting over the side of the tramp, didn’t need to see that.”

“Bob? Is that some sort of chanting or singing going on in the background?”

“Yeah, Duane. The women in the group seem to be chanting, ‘Walk a mile in my shoes’ as they are tossing the doctors onto the trampoline.”

“Bob? What’s all that other noise we are hearing?”

“Well, Duane, it looks like some of the women are ringing bells at the doctors on the tramp. And shaking all manner of objects, sounds like rocks inside of tin cans. Wow, the women are shaking them like maracas, setting up quite a racket. Miss! Sorry to bother, can you tell me the significance of the noise making?”

“Sure, Sonny. Say, don’t I know you from somewhere? These here cans are partly full of gravel. I’m shaking mine to simulate the noise I hear when I have an episode of tinnitus. That’s my friend, Rhonda, over there, she’s ringing a dinner bell.”

“I mean this as a compliment, you both look perfectly healthy to me.”

“Rhonda! Come help me with this guy. Sonny, you need some schooling, and we got just the thing.”

“Hey, hey, put me down! I can’t get on there, I get seasick! I just had lunch! I’ll vomit all over my suit. Hey!”

“Looks like we’ve lost Bob in the crowd, folks. We’ll try to get Bob back in a little bit and see how he’s doing. Meanwhile, how about this fall weather, huh? Let’s go now to our meteorologist, Hailey Brack for the latest forecast. Hello, Hailey.”

“We served together in the war,” Grandpa said. “Your Uncle Rodney saved my life.”

Merv looked up from the model airplane he was painting. “What war, Grandpa? There hasn’t been a war for years.”

“I served on a ship in the South Pacific,” Grandpa went on. “Rodney flew in the sky.”

“What, like a bird?” Danny snorted. Even though his eyes were on the Wonderful World of Disney, he kicked a foot and connected squarely with the shin of his little sister, Peg, who screamed.

“When can we meet him?” asked Merv.

Grandpa stood up. “You want to meet him? You can meet him right now, but don’t tell your mother.”

Peg stopped screaming. Merv put down his paintbrush. The three kids followed Grandpa out the kitchen door.

The night air was chilly. Peg started whimpering. Merv picked her up and carried her on his hip. The kids followed Grandpa along the narrow path to the decrepit ancient garage that nobody ever used anymore. Tall wet grass on either side drenched their clothes.

Grandpa paused and started digging in a pocket of his blue jeans.

“That door don’t work, Grandpa,” Danny said. “We tried, lotsa times.” Then he added, “Not to break anything, honest. Just to see what’s in there.”

“Ah, here it is.” Grandpa worked a key into the rusty lock and pushed the door open on balky hinges. “Come on, not a sound, though.”

The kids followed Grandpa through the door, one by one. An unfamiliar metallic smell permeated the dark interior. Grandpa pointed them toward a low wall built of rough stone. “Sit there,” he whispered. “Let your eyes adjust.” Then he said, “Now look up.”

The three children looked up. “There’s no roof!” Merv said. Against a pitch black sky, puffy blue-black clouds obscured the moon.

“Quiet,” Grandpa said in a low voice. The kids could not see his face in the dark. “We don’t want to wake him up. He’s been flying all night. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Great Battle. We’re presenting him with an award for bravery under extreme fire and for saving a fellow soldier.”

“That was you?” Merv whispered.

“You never leave a buddy. We went down, and we were stranded. My leg was busted. He carried me for almost three miles, on his back, through rough terrain. I wouldn’t have made it without Rodney.”

“How come we never see him?” asked Merv.

“The war changed him. It’s hard for him to be around people. You’ll meet him properly tomorrow, because your mother invited him to breakfast. That should be interesting. I should warn you, he’s not easy to look at. He was burned all up one side. You have to promise me you won’t scream when you see his face.”

Peg started to whimper again. Danny punched her arm.

“What are we doing out here in the garage, then?” asked Merv, shivering a little.

“Don’t you see him?” Grandpa pointed toward the far corner of the garage, where there was a large black mound.

“I don’t see nothing,” Danny said, kicking the wall with both heels. “I smell something funny, though.”

“That’s Rodney,” Grandpa chuckled. “Uh-oh, I think we woke him up.” Grandpa turned and addressed the mound of something in the darkest corner. “Sorry, old friend. Were you dreaming?”

Something moved. A yellow eye opened. A large mouth appeared, filled with rows of gleaming sharp teeth. A heavy body shifted upright, and two scaly wings unfurled, almost brushing the sides of the garage. Coughing sounds came from somewhere deep inside the creature who was awakening in front of them. The stench of sulphur wafted toward the visitors.

“I was dreaming of children.” A deep raspy voice caused the walls of the garage to shudder. “I love children, especially the ones I haven’t eaten yet.”

Moving in unison, without hesitation, Merv and Danny picked up Peg by the arms and hustled her kicking out the door. Peg’s screams faded as they ran for the house.

“Now why did you go and do that?” Grandpa laughed.

“Better they know now what I am,” Rodney said. “Then they won’t give me any trouble when I have pancakes with them in the morning. Trust me. It always works.”

Clark sat smoking by a roadside cross under the full moon of December, waiting for the ghost of his uncle to appear. Everyone knew the Cold Moon inspired ghosts to appear at the site of their death. At accident sites all around the outskirts of Gresham, relatives and friends sat on damp grass, on the hoods of cars, on lawn chairs, drinking, smoking, talking quietly, watching the sky for clouds, and waiting for their loved ones to come back to wispy life, just for a few minutes, before fading.

Clark’s uncle Marty had bought the farm when a Chevy pickup T-boned his Ford Fiesta. This intersection was dangerous to begin with, but a Ford Fiesta had no chance against pretty much anything, so nobody was surprised when the coroner called to say Marty had died instantly, never knew what hit him. Bam. The driver of the Chevy pickup had walked away.

A week after the accident, Clark had erected this wooden cross, looking somewhat bent now from shoddy work and the weather, but still displaying the words “RIP Uncle Marty.” This intersection at Division and Oxbow Drive bristled with white crosses. Lots of people had met their maker here, where visibility was curtailed by trees and a bad street angle. However, Clark suspected many people drove drunk is this semi-rural part of Oregon. One of them was probably his Uncle Marty.

Finally, the moment arrived. The frosty air around the garden of makeshift crosses had begun to shimmer. Clark tossed his cigarette into the gutter.

“Come on, Uncle Marty,” Clark muttered.

“Uncle Marty. I’m not your Uncle Marty,” said a raspy voice. The wavering image of an old woman in a straw hat rose straight up out of the ground and hovered over Uncle Marty’s cross.

“Who are you?” Clark said, looking around.

“Myrna Osbourne is my name. What happened to my cross? You take it?”

“Aunt Myrna!”

Clark turned to find a big man in overalls rushing over from the other side of the street.

“Hi, Sonny,” the ghost of Myrna Osbourne said, waving at the man. “How you been?”

The man elbowed Clark out of the way. Clark stood in confusion for a moment and then scanned the vicinity. Several other ghosts were sitting around on boulders and downed tree limbs, chewing the fat while the moon loomed above. He recognized no one, but he suspected people probably looked different after death.

“Uncle Marty?” Clark called, turning in circles. “Where are you?”

“Over here, Clark.”

Clark ran across the road and found the ghost of his uncle wobbling around the edge of a steep slope. A narrow creek chattered in the rocks below.

“Wait, this is where you crashed?” Clark asked. “I thought it was over there. That’s where I put your cross.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that,” Uncle Marty said. He draped his ectoplasm over a big rock, not quite sitting. He patted his pockets in a familiar gesture. “What’s up, kid? How’s the family?”

“Good, everyone’s good,” Clark said. “What’s it like on the other side?”

“What other side? You mean the road? It would be real thoughtful of you if you would move my cross over here. Comforting, you know what I mean?”

Clark nodded. “I’ll do that right away, Uncle Marty. No, I meant, what’s it like being dead?”

“It ain’t like living, that’s all I can say,” said Uncle Marty. “Dang, I wish I had a cigarette. Did you bring anything to drink? I’m parched.”

“Uh, isn’t that what got you creamed in the first place?” Clark asked.

“Hmph. That doofus in the pickup was the one drinking, you ask me. I only had a little snort, well, maybe a couple, down at the Canoe. I was perfectly fine to drive.”

“That’s not what the coroner said.”

“The coroner.” Uncle Marty snapped wispy fingers. “I remember that dude. He had to scrape bits of me—”

Clark held up his hand. “Don’t need the details. Just wanted to say hi, tell you we’re all doing okay. Dotty’s had another baby, Dad’s still got lung cancer, and Billy’s still in jail, so basically everything is status quo since you left.”

“And you, how you keeping?”

Clark shrugged. “I quit drinking, that’s about all.”

Uncle Marty nodded. “Probably a wise decision, you want to avoid going out like I did.” He looked up at the moon, now fading behind clouds. “Listen, kid, gotta go. It was good seeing you again. Say hi to everyone. And move my dang cross, would you?”

“I sure will, Uncle Marty. See you next year.”

The reporter’s escort and driver stopped the golf cart at a steel security door. The six-story warehouse loomed overhead, painted a gunmetal gray. Windows reflected a few clouds drifting over low mountains to the south. Flat desert stretched in all directions, punctuated by scrub pinions and creosote.

“I wait one hour,” Emil said, lighting up a cigarette. Seeing Garth’s face, he relented. “Maybe two. You understand. Happy hour at four.”

Garth grabbed his backpack and ascended concrete steps to press a button in the wall. A speaker squawked. “Garth Potter, from the Sun City Times?”

The latch clicked. The door swung open, hinges screeching just a little. A small woman in gray overalls nodded him into a dark hallway. “Squeaky. Not much traffic through this door,” she said. “I’m Letty. This way, Mr. Potter. Let me introduce you to some of our residents.

The hallway opened into a high-ceilinged living room. Letty pointed out the features of the room as she moved into the room. “Natural light, sustainably sourced bamboo carpet, hypo-allergenic environment. Ergonomic furniture. Blue-block glasses for watching PBS on the big screen TV.” Letty stopped in front of an elderly white-haired woman seated in a wheelchair.

Garth held out his hand. “Hello, I’m Garth Potter, how are you?”

“Fake,” the woman said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have some ice cream, Mrs. Lewis.” Letty motioned to an aide standing next to a pushcart loaded with a large plastic cooler and stacks of tiny plastic dishes. The aide scooped a round ball of something into dish and handed it to the old woman.

“Spoon,” Mrs. Lewis said.

“Come this way, Mr. Potter. I’d like to show you some resident apartments.”

As he followed Letty, Garth noticed the light coming from the windows in the living room seemed inordinately bright, given the late afternoon hour. He examined the nearest window and realized the light emanated from fluorescent bulbs placed behind blue frosted glass. He pulled out his reporter’s notebook and jotted a note.

Letty punched a button by the down arrow in the wall between two elevator doors. One door opened. Garth followed her inside. In the confined space, she had a body odor Garth found unpleasant, a musty smell mixed with garlic that brought to mind his grandmother. She had died in a place somewhat like this, he remembered.

Letty poked a button on the elevator wall marked –10.

Garth said, “Is there a basement? This place is bigger than I realized.”

“Six stories above ground. Twelve stories below.”

The elevator hesitated and began to descend. Garth felt the vibration of motors, pulleys, and levers through the soles of his dress shoes. He stood next to Letty in silence and watched the numbers above the door, breathing through his mouth.

The elevator stopped with a thud. The doors opened onto a narrow corridor lit by overhead fluorescent lights. Garth stopped. “Why, it looks like a train car!”

Multiple heads sporting various amounts of hair, mostly white, emerged from bunks on either side of the hallway. Elderly people peered at him through thick glasses.

“Whoo, what have you brought us, Warden?” cackled a bald oldster, leaning dangerously out of an upper berth.

“A young one, a young one!” warbled a white-haired woman much like Mrs. Lewis.

Clanging echoed off the walls as word began to spread.

“What is this? What is going on here?” Garth turned to Letty.

“This is the modern solution to an old problem.”

“Come here, young man,” beckoned a woman. Memories of Garth’s deceased grandmother resurfaced. Wrinkled cheeks dusted with powder. Lipstick applied with a shaky hand. Wide smile showing missing teeth. And that pervasive smell he associated with old age: perfume, mildew, garlic, and feces. “C’mere. Look at my crib.”

Garth walked a few steps along the hall to peer into the woman’s room. Her berth was about four by eight feet square. A thin mattress occupied a good amount of floor space. The rest was dedicated to a dresser, an ottoman, and some shelves loaded with bins that appeared to hold clothing and various household items. A one-burner campstove sat on the top of the dresser. Garth noticed several gallon-sized jugs along the back wall, some empty, some appearing to hold a clear liquid.

“This is Rapunzel,” Letty said, waiting expectantly. When Garth didn’t respond, she added, “From Warehouse Adventures?”

Garth shook his head.

“Come here, young man,” Rapunzel said. She held a smartphone in her hand.

“Are you filming me?”

Rapunzel smoothed her mane of long white hair and smooched at the phone. Then she turned the camera toward Garth. “Now I am. What’s your name, sonnie? Say something to my followers.”

“Your followers? You mean . . . ?”

“Warehouse Adventures,” Rapunzel said. “My YouTube channel. Is the earth still turning up above? Does the sun still shine?”

Garth turned to Letty. “YouTube channel?”

Letty smirked. “I would have thought you would have done your homework, Mr. Potter. Almost all of the residents in this retirement community have their own YouTube channels. How do you think they survive?”

“I thought the government subsidizes . . . I mean, our taxpayer dollars . . . “

Rapunzel laughed. “He thinks the goverment takes care of us! Isn’t that charming?” She beckoned Garth to lean into her space. “I just got thirty-thousand views for my latest vlog. I redid my floor plan last week. Moved my bed from that side to this side. My best video by far has been the poop video.”

Garth swallowed. “The poop video?”

“Yeah, for some reason, my followers really like to hear how old people go number two in this place.”

“Don’t you have restrooms?”

“Sure, down at the end of the hall, but most of us can’t walk. Nobody is going to help us. So we have our systems. Some of us use buckets and bags. Me, I have a little tripod thing with a very comfy seat. I used to use kitty litter, but I switched to pine pellets recently. My followers had a lot of questions.”

“How do you get supplies?” Garth asked, pulling out his notebook.

“From Amazon, of course, like everyone else in the world, duh,” Rapunzel laughed. “Here, check this out.” She lifted the lid of her ottoman. Garth reared back at the smell. “Oh, sorry, I forgot I hadn’t dumped this morning’s poop. Wait, let me set up my camera. I should film this.”

She inserted the phone into a device on the dresser and turned it so it would capture her movements. With practiced hands, she lifted the toilet seat lid, twirled the bag of poop and presumably pine pellets, and tied it off with a neat knot. She grabbed the phone from the holder and pressed some buttons. “Hold on, I’m just going to upload this real quick . . . there.”

Garth had backed up into the hallway to escape the stench. He turned to Letty.

“What happens when they . . . ?”

“Die? We have a system to handle human waste of all kinds,” Letty said.

“I didn’t see a cemetery on the grounds,” Garth said. “Where do you . . .?”

“Dispose of the bodies? In each van—sorry, bedroom, I mean. The residents like to call their rooms vans—in each bedroom, there’s a trash chute leading to the incinerator. Plastic trash goes to the incinerator. That includes all the poop bags. The human remains are diverted to the reclaimer, where they are mixed with water and other chemicals for recycling.”

“Recycling! You can’t possibly mean . . .”

“No, heavens, Mr. Potter. We aren’t cannibals. No, we make fertilizer. How else are we going to feed the world’s growing population? We ship our slurry to several fertilizer plants along the Gulf Coast, where the remains are processed into a very nutritious compost tea highly appreciated by America’s corn and soybean farmers.

Garth nodded and put his notebook in his backpack. “Well, this has been very informative, thank you for the tour. My driver is waiting for me.”

“So long, kid!” Rapunzel yelled as Garth backed away toward the elevator. “Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Warehouse Adventures!”

Letty escorted Garth to the exit. As he hurried out the door, Garth muttered something to indicate his appreciation, for what exactly he wasn’t sure. Outside, he found his driver parked at the foot of the steps in the golfcart.

“Seen enough?” Emil said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“More than enough,” Garth said. “Do we still have time to make happy hour?”

“On our way.”