In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Nesbit Pile
  • H.G. McCrary (bio)

The garbage had been piling up at the edge of the Cuthberts’ front lawn for the better part of a year. Beneath the swarming gulls, the mound grew as high and wide as a soccer goal. It spilled over the curb, tumbled into the street, and clogged the gutter. The rain came and a river formed. Murky water flowed down the gentle slope of Alderview Terrace, past the boarded-up ramblers of those who had fled ahead of the sickness, past the brick one-story where the Gleasons were hunkered down with two years of dry rations. The rain pooled into small lakes before each of the great trash piles of Alderview: the Henderson and the Singh, the Markland and the Nesbit, the Wong and a half-dozen others.

Among the piles, the Cuthbert stood third from the highest. Its crest had been flattened near the center to form a bench, where Daniel Cuthbert sat. Daniel was eleven and small for that age, half-lost in his father’s windbreaker. He pulled a plastic grocery sack over each of his Keds and fastened them with rubber bands, then he stood and wiped the drizzle from his brow. The clouds sat low and angry. Daniel shimmied down into a shoulder-deep hole and began to dig through the trash. He burrowed in with cupped palms and scooped out milky wads of newsprint and paper toweling, coffee filters caked with food sludge, and gleaming silver Pop-Tart wrappers. He examined each handful, then tossed it to the ground to be pocked and flattened by the drizzle.

A pair of gulls tussled at the edge of his hole, and Daniel shooed them off. He dug out a crushed beer can and set it atop the heap, did the same with a busted mug and a root-beer bottle. Near the bottom of the hole, the weight of the pile had begun to compress the refuse into a solid mass. It was a lower stratum, a different slice of time that Daniel could reach into. He burrowed down and found a molded baby orange—a cutie, his mother would have called it. She had packed one in his lunch most days, sliced the skin with [End Page 37] a paring knife to form a little tab, a place for him to begin his peeling. He pressed a thumbnail against the orange. It bulged like a water-balloon and he pressed harder until it split apart in his hands. A trickle of dark juice spilled over his palm and dribbled beneath the sleeve of his windbreaker. Most of the orange flesh had rotted away, but he found a fibery tuft and put it in his mouth. He daydreamed of citrus curling his tongue, sour lunchroom smells, he and Randy Stoat—cofounders of the Chinook Elementary Petrology Club—sorting rock samples into egg cartons labeled with type and subtype: Igneous–Basalt; Sedimentary–Chert; Metamorphic–Schist. For a moment it seemed this might still be his life, then there was only rotting orange and he spit and kept digging.

Rain ticked against his windbreaker and dripped down the nape of his neck. His older brother, Henry, came outside around ten, when the sun was trying to push through the gray. Henry had just turned fifteen and had a long sullen face and bangs he trimmed with a straightedge. He leaned over Daniel’s hole and nodded toward the bottles and cans set out on its rim. “You idiots have a plan?” he asked. “Or just throwing shit again?”

“Miles says we’re going to set things right today.”

“That guy’s damaged, D-man. Fully torqued.”

Daniel pulled at a knot in his hair. “Miles is alright.”

“Suit yourself,” Henry said, and he walked away.

An hour later, Daniel found the remains of a grocery list with three items legible in his mother’s handwriting: toothpaste, juice boxes, red wine. He folded the list to save it, but the paper disintegrated and he gave it up to the rain.

“It’s not healthy,” Henry said, when he passed again.

Daniel pulled a wad of matted brown hair from the trash...

pdf

Share