Cecil Disharoon reads “Garbage Mouth Meets the Neighbors” at Martin Park in Boulder.
Allowing for dusk, Cecil’s edited a version of “Trash Talk” that picks interesting segments up in the middle of the story, so we can end the story before dark.
The story time itself will include some initial audience interaction for fun,, relevant to the start of the tale. The presentation will be about forty minutes.
Below is an excerpt, from early on in the story, just as the tension’s mounted and explodes.
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And now, an excerpt:
Jerry, Glenn and Tim didn’t show up drunk this time. Maybe they didn’t care about public intoxication. But if they were jailed for doing what the rightful leader of the free world said, there were hard, proud words- hell to pay.
In their distracted state, they are, themselves, a distraction. They hope they’re intimidating.
Merriwyn foresees: they are here for show- perhaps to scare away any criminal sorts they imagined, coming within their vigilant perimeters. She knows law enforcement is unlikely to say anything to them – their flags in the trunks of their trucks include one that says Blue Lives Matter, an American flag without the red. If no one else complains the right way, then hey: they are clearly just standing there. If the law wants them to go back to their trucks, of course they will. They aren’t the rioters and looters, like those other people across America’s cities. Their guy wins. The bad guys, lose.
This is clear. As they would say: They have the right to go in and look in them machines. They done talked about this. They have the right to watch who comes in and out when the votes are counted. They are still Free, White, and 21 in America, and they will pull out this old saying without irony.
As if sneezed away, the facial tissue drifts off the back of one of the trucks. A piece of saw-dusted timber; a tennis ball that lost its bounce and then its owner; a piece of paper billing announcements of community interest; a crushed Coke can. Litter. Trash left irresponsibly.
As Rosie goes through the sunlit glass door of the polling place, her husband Billy, beside her, has to admit to himself: he’d really like some sign, to feel assured what he is doing is right. He and Rosie have voted for the same party for forty years. Billy was so mad at the knowledge his candidate would only lose if the other side cheated. Billy values thinking realistically, even while he privately daydreams a lot. Gender-affirming counseling confuses children too young to grasp it. Billy doesn’t want his country to sink beneath the weight of ‘pie in the sky’ promises for material comfort, in exchange for votes. What communist nation hasn’t come to ruin? But even now, something his candidate said still disturbs him. Why did he misstate the purpose of the Medal of Honor? He thinks about his brother, Ralph, never the same again after the war.
He wants to make the real world make sense. Where is some sign?
Across the street, climbing over a No Trespassing sign hung on a dumpster, Tommy Berea dives for copper wire to recycle, to pay for his daughter’s tuition to Cedar Banks Academy. Only vaguely self-conscious, Tommy mutters to himself: Who cares what these people think?
Suddenly the copper scraps roll out, apparently of their own accord, missing his fingers by inches.
One piece of debris, then, apparently, the pick of all the litter, tumbles along with gravity’s pull. That is nothing too exceptional – it is humdrum, to notice an excess of trash scattered around a polling place.
Upon closer inspection, it composes of itself a marionette of the insistent wind. The white, two-handled shopping bag cavorts now like something stepping into life from an Adventure Time cartoon, dancing into an alarming amount of garbage clearly animated in a way that defies nature.
“Some people act as though trash collects itself,” muses Peaches.
And then –
Shock, an alienated disbelief: the lonely reaction of every rational person standing in line outside. In their stomach, every person feels like prey.
“Never have I ever…”
She finds that party game question funny. Maybe she’ll live to play games.
How could any other person see something so uncanny? By their collective alarm, however, they know it quickly to be true.
See, people generally don’t pay a thought to garbage. The depressing reality, however, is the contribution of random thoughtless citizens has given rise to a quasi-humanoid figure from edges of nightmares. What they begin to see, their minds refuse.
Perhaps already poised mentally for the bizarre, Peaches doesn’t want anyone hurt by a panic.
These objects, randomly scattered and devoid of meaning, evoke a sense of dread that furrows Peaches’ brow. She could Tik Tok, it: show how the trouble takes form, so clearly alarmed and urgent. Hey, look, Chaos on Cue! Premiering now. #worldstar #ballotbox.
Before almost anyone would believe it, viewers would marvel: first, is it a dust devil? And if it seems to take on a form, then, who made it look so real? Some laugh; only the utterly-disbelieving few would be bored. Some would get a little intoxicated and watch it again.
She recalls the Sphere of Protection, the peace called to the four quarters of Earth, feels serenity in the face of this grotesqueness. She wonders if her ritual had forced it to embody itself, lurking no more. Would that, completed, it had simply kept the thing away!
Before it completes its form, she knows it by its intent.
