What Survives
by Colette Phair
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One night she saw all the world's garbage, woke up to it... Among the piles, the growth it was.
Candy wrappers wouldn't have surprised her, or computer parts. But all the disowned
components that made up her world were here, lumped together not by use but in order of
expire. Rotted food no longer food... Entire chickens sometimes, their legs snapped and spread
apart, glaze dripping like a nervous sweat. Toys children had grown out of, and their children...
Half-things, glasses with only one lens and single shoes. But here, somewhere, they all formed
pairs. And billions of contact lenses, all somehow landed in the same place, forming a congealed
cloud, occasionally punctuated by upturned ice cream cones or some totally unexpected item like
currency, folded into oragami frogs.
Starting out along the mass - there was no path to distinguish - she scaled the mountains of it.
On her way were bouquets of syringes, broken pencils, and auto parts. Here rust was an entity,
enveloping and eating up unidentified machines. Phone cords wrapped around globes like hair.
Unopened packages of make-up reflecting in shards of broken mirrors. Nothing seemed to go
with anything else.
Just then her feet almost stepped into rollerskates and she continued, ducking under a detached
street sign. Everything was so intact, not changed from being someplace else. She found a half-
written love letter, and a ripped-up photograph. A rejection note from an employer and one
crumpled up: “Ben, I know you're reading this...� Then she tripped over a few stuffed
bears and almost landed right in it - an entire cake, ice cream yet unmelted...only the words â
€œHappy Birâ€� and “enniferâ€� legible... And on top of that, at its center like a garnish
was a used feminine napkin, folded neatly yet come undone, dark brown blood dried unevenly...
what someone had once tried so hard to hide now right out here in plain sight.
Slowly she was making her way up a sloping bank, trying for the summit. As she climbed the
landscape changed, flowing down with the force of her step. Beyond she saw other mountains,
their black composite shown as only a profile in the light beyond. From the side they jutted
indiscriminately, building up or lapsing down. She came across a full pop bottle, rolled it over
with her foot and read its side. “Please recycle,� it said. Then for a moment she was
walking on stairs someone had thrown away.
As she made it farther up, the sorts of items she saw changed. Smaller, lighter pieces sprinkled
the top layer, styrofoam cups forming hats for paper airplanes. Then, before she'd expected, she
had made it to the top. Balancing there with her nose in her hands, she could see nowhere that it
wasn't. She felt at once an overwhelming loss of control, no hope for sorting out the chaos
before her.
At that moment she heard a slipping, sensed a mechanical jerk. A force came over the waste
and somehow it was rising, being lifted away and yet the rest was sliding down where it had
been. She found she was sliding down with it, her feet giving way beneath her. At first she
struggled, grabbing for it with both arms, trying to use it as an anchor... But then she just lay
back, rode the downpour like a wave and felt with every inch of skin the remnants of this world
dissolve her.
