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  Suddenly, it shoved its beak between her lips. Blaise choked, tried to drop the beast, but its flexed claws grasped her tightly. Impossibly, it crammed its whole head into her mouth. Blaise gagged. She could feel its beak sliding down her throat. It would sear her, like a hot poker. She fought, looking imploringly at Sharon and Johnny, but they just sat on the floor, watching.

  Blaise tried to vomit the beast out, but it kept pushing more of itself inside her. How, how? It was unbelievable. Her mouth was stretched open so wide, she thought it would tear. Heat filled her, her ribs would crack apart. The beast's head and neck snaked down towards her belly. Its wings beat against her teeth, her tongue. Her throat, it was in her throat, stopping her air! Terrified, she pulled at the cockatrice's legs. It clawed her hands away. With a great heave, its whole bulk slid into her stomach. She could feel its muscly writhing, its fire that now came from her core. She could breathe, and she was angry enough to spit fire.

  “What oonuh were thinking!” she raged at them. “Why you didn't help me!”

  Johnny only said, “I bet you feel good now.”

  Oh. She did. Strong, sure of herself. Oh.

  Sharon leaned over Johnny and blew cool, aloe-scented breath on his blisters. Blaise admired the way that the position emphasized the fullness of her body. Johnny's burns healed as Blaise watched. “I enjoyed your company this afternoon,” she said to them both. Simple, risky words to say with this new-found warmth in her voice.

  Sharon smiled. “You must come and visit again soon, then.”

  Blaise giggled. She reached a hand to either of them, feeling the blood heat of her palms flexing against theirs.

  A HARD TRUTH ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT

  Sumanth Prabhaker

  Sumanth Prabhaker is the founder of Madras Press and has had fiction published in, among others, Identity Theory, The New Pantagruel, and Best American Fantasy.

  The family liked so much to flush their trash down the toilet that they sold their TV and used the money to buy three chairs to arrange in their upstairs restroom. This was a time when trash flushing was not an uncommon practice, but even then this particular family’s enjoyment was rare. Where most families who resorted to trash flushing were ashamed of their behavior, this family looked forward to the sight of their trash bins filling up. They would recline in their three chairs and watch their trash get sucked down into the hole at the bottom of the toilet, which had a permanent black ring smeared around it, and they would cheer and punch their fists together.

  None of the three chairs in the restroom matched in size or color. The family had driven to the shopping mall and split up, and one hour later each member returned to the parking lot, carrying a chair that cost roughly one-third of the price the pawnshop had paid for the TV. The father’s chair was upholstered with a brown polyester finish and had an electrical cord emerging from the back. When he plugged his chair into the restroom wall and sat in it, he would feel small vibrations all over his shoulders and even around his knees, and he would wonder how he would ever manage to leave such a comfortable chair.

  The mother’s chair was more like a swing than a chair. It hung from the ceiling like a swing and it swung like a swing, but it was very comfortable as well. The cushion was made of a mixture of gelatin and polycarbonate, so every time she sat down, it would shift around to make space for her, like a mold. The mother loved her mold cushion because she often carried a portable whiteboard in her pocket, which made her pants stick out in a direction most normal cushions couldn’t accommodate. She used the whiteboard to communicate with others, having lost the ability to speak as a child.

  The son’s chair was made of gingerbread, graham crackers, gumdrops, licorice ropes, jawbreakers, chocolate bars, bubble gum sticks, candied fruits, lollipops and suckers, nougats, caramel cream cubes, honey roasted cashews, peanut butter cups, and a long crunchy board that tasted alternately like balsa wood and brittle. The cushion was cotton candy. The chair was covered in hairs and strings of dust and all kinds of sticky papers, but the son did not mind. He sat in his chair every day and every day he would pick off little bits to eat while he watched loads of trash sink down the toilet and occasionally use the X-Tend-O plunger to unclog the drain without having to get up.

  At first the family had simply tried to cut down on their waste by recycling; they used banana peels as fertilizer and plastic wrap as kindling, which turned the fires in the fireplace a blue-green hue they liked especially to make s’mores over. The mother used hot glue to string together small wreaths from the trash that accrued naturally in their home. She also tried cooking the pieces of paper they used to throw away. For herself she shredded newspaper and stirred it into carrot stews. For the father she deep-fried old Post-it notes and spread boursin cheese over them to hide their messages. For the son she made a crude chewing gum by churning tampon boxes and corn syrup, but he never chewed it, preferring instead to saturate his graded homework assignments in simple syrup and butter and crumple the sheets into balls that he would freeze and later eat for a snack on hot afternoons.

  The father finally put this diet to a stop when he found a Christmas card stuck inside a leftover flan. He called a family meeting that night.

  “I’m putting this diet to a stop,” he said.

  “It’s not our choice,” the son said.

  He’s right, the mother wrote. Trash has to go somewhere.

  “I don’t care. We’ll do what we have to do, but there will be no more eating of trash in this home. This is lower than dogs,” the father said, holding up the Christmas card on his fork.

  The family looked helplessly at one another; there was too much trash, they knew, and not enough space for it in their home, but they couldn’t keep up with the rising price of the city garbage stickers. Staring down at his feet, the son confessed a habit he’d picked up from his friends at school.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “when I can’t finish my lunch, I flush it down the toilet.”

  He showed his parents how he would empty his paper bag into the toilet, and how easily its contents were taken away from him. The mother cried in silence.

  “I don’t know where it goes to,” the son said, “but it’s free.”

  “You’ve saved us a lot of grief,” the father said.

  I’m proud of you, even if you don’t like my sandwiches, the mother wrote, wiping at her tears.

  The family began trash flushing the next day. They were the first in the city to try it in such a large scale. They gathered uneaten food and grocery bags and the bag from inside the vacuum cleaner when it got full, and they piled everything up to the rim of the toilet. The son pressed the flusher and watched the trash spin around in a circle, and then slowly lower.

  Look at it spin, the mother wrote.

  Trash flushing soon became a habit for the family; when they no longer needed something, it went into the toilet, and immediately it was taken away. They felt this process bore an uncanny resemblance to the way their bodies functioned, which made it vaguely Native American—feeling to them.

  To keep the water bill from going up, the family used public restrooms when they could, and they agreed to flush their trash only twice a day, once at 4:00 and once at 10:00. This way they had something to anticipate all afternoon and all evening, and they could share in the flushing together, which only seemed appropriate to them.

  The 4:00 flush was the louder of the two. This was partly because the afternoons tended to collect the louder sort of trash, such as cardboard slats and empty cans of hairspray, and partly it was because the family had been thinking of nothing but this 4:00 flush all day, and so they cheered rather loudly for it. They cheered when trash piled up too high and they had to steer it with brooms to keep from tipping over. They cheered when the mother got sick from the combination of trash smell and lavender Glade plug-in and she leaned forward and vomited into the toilet bowl; she cheered this as well, clapping along with her son and husband. And they cheered when the toilet shook and made a we
t belching sound after sucking down the afternoon’s trash, and a small gray animal popped out from the toilet and landed on the bathmat.

  The animal shivered as the family cheered it on. It shook its leathery skin and curled around the graham cracker leg of the son’s chair.

  After much consideration, the animal was decided to be a male cat. He was named Bleachy, after the way he smelled. “You’re better than anything we put into the toilet,” the son told Bleachy, scratching the back of his leathery neck.

  When the family took Bleachy on walks around the neighborhood, other families stared and pointed at them. Trash flushing had grown more widespread by then, due to the steep price of garbage tickets, but no other family bragged about it the way this particular family bragged about it. They outlined all the grease stains on their T-shirts with magic marker and group-hugged every time Bleachy coughed up a ball of their old trash. This was something Bleachy did very often, so the family trained him to cough into the toilet when he needed to.

  But Bleachy soon grew to be emotionally needy in ways the family couldn’t satisfy. He ate all their food and cried all night. He constantly napped in the father’s massage chair, which caused the electric bill to go up, because he never remembered to turn the massage function off. He even borrowed the son’s sweaters without asking, which stretched them in strange shapes as he grew larger and longer.

  It was a relief, then, when the son returned home from school one afternoon to find no trace of Bleachy in the front yard. None of his shoes appeared to have been eaten while he was away. Upstairs, his mother swayed from her chair in the restroom. Her face was flushed.

  I’ve done a terrible thing, she wrote. I flushed Bleachy back down.

  “Well, he was very codependent,” said the son, trying to hide his tears. “I guess he was also too big for a cat.”

  It was so strange, the mother wrote. He said he missed his home. He asked me to flush him back down, but now I think the toilet broke.

  The son pressed the flusher and it flipped down carelessly, with no friction or resistance. The X-Tend-O plunger didn’t help, nor did the Ultra Sonic Air Hammer plunger, which the family reserved for emergencies. The son stared at his mother’s reflection in the mirror, wondering how to lie to his father.

  The bathroom smells so bad, the mother wrote when the father came home from work that day.

  “It’s probably toxic,” the son said. “None of us should go in for a few days at least. Also Bleachy got hit by a car. We had a funeral while you were at work.”

  “Well, these things happen,” the father said, trying to hide his tears. “I guess it’s a shame about the bathroom.”

  The father liked his brown vibrating chair and how it felt like small voices against his back, and he had loved Bleachy as much as anyone, but more than either of these he valued his family’s safety. By dinnertime that night, he had locked the restroom door and stuffed towels in the cracks, except where in the corner under the hinges he had inserted a flexible rubber tube, to occasionally check the air inside.

  The door remained locked for eleven days.

  When finally the father agreed to venture into the restroom again, the family’s trash bins were concealed under triangles of trash. Spider webs netted the hallways and maggots took up the fridge’s crisper drawers. The family had dug a small outhouse in their backyard while the restroom was indisposed, a four foot hole covered by the son’s Batman tent. Two neighbors had already moved away because of what the family’s reputation had done to the subdivision’s property value; a third had moved over the past week, seeing the family’s trash pile up so fiercely against the living room window that the glass fractured and leaked out an oily substance.

  The father first strapped dental masks on all three of them. He then opened the door two inches and released a finch tied to his wrist, and shut the door. He counted to twenty and opened the door again, tugging his wrist back. The other end of the string had only the finch’s foot attached to it.

  The son shrugged and opened the door.

  Inside, lying across the counter, was a gray crocodile wearing a tan sweater.

  Bleachy, the mother wrote.

  “Dang it,” the father said.

  “I knew you weren’t a cat,” the son said.

  The mother stared at the wet pencil shavings littered along the crocodile’s skin and tried to understand.

  “I got stuck halfway,” Bleachy said. “I had to come back up or I would drown.”

  I’m sorry, the mother wrote. I understand how you feel.

  Bleachy lurched forward and locked his jaws around her throat and pulled up, dislodging her head. The son ran downstairs, listening from under a pile of kitchen trash as his father screamed, and then gurgled, and then fell silent.

  The son eventually fell asleep, still wearing his oxygen mask. He dreamed of stepping on dry leaves, when actually his brain was trying to warn him that Bleachy was munching his way toward the son. When Bleachy had eaten all the trash in the corner, he rested his nose on the son’s knee.

  The son awoke with a gasp.

  “Don’t worry,” Bleachy said, “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Please don’t kill me,” the son said.

  “Listen to me,” Bleachy said. “I’m not going to kill you. You’ve made some poor choices, but you’re young. You still have time to change.”

  “Where’s my dad?” the son asked.

  “How would you like it if there was a big tube that poured someone else’s trash on your house?” Bleachy said. “How would you like it if I took you away and made you cough in my toilet?”

  Bleachy placed his teeth around the son’s calf and bit down until he felt the bone underneath. The son cried out, looking at the new holes in his leg, his eyes cracked like crayon. The jaws came unclamped without a sound, and Bleachy turned and crawled away, out of the house, still wearing the son’s tan sweater. Filled with a feeling that was almost sorrow, Bleachy lifted his long gray head and breathed in deep, hoping to find a scent that would remind him of home.

  STINKY GIRL

  Hiromi Goto

  Hiromi Goto’s first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region and was co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her YA/Crossover novel, Half World (2009), was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received the 2010 Sunburst Award and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award.

  One is never certain when one becomes a stinky girl. I am almost positive I wasn’t stinky when I slid out from between my mother’s legs, fresh as blood and just as sweet. What could be stinkier, messier, grosser than that? one might be asked. But I’m certain I must have smelled rich, like yeast and liver. Not the stink of I-don’t-know-what which pervades me now.

  Mother has looked over my shoulder to see what I am trying to cover up with my hand and arm, while I meditatively write at the kitchen table.

  “Jesus!” she rolls her eyes like a whale. “Jesus Christ!” she yells. “Don’t talk about yourself as ‘one’! One what, for God’s sake? One asshole? One snivelling stinky girl?” She stomps off. Thank goodness. It’s very difficult having a mother. It’s even more difficult having a loud and coarse one.

  Where was I? Oh yes. I am not troubled by many things. My size, my mother, my dead father’s ghost, and a pet dog that despises me do not bother me so very much. Well, perhaps on an off day, they might bring a few tears to my eyes, but no one will notice a fat stinky mall rat weeping. People generally believe that fatties secrete all sorts of noxious substances from their bodies. But regardless. The one bane of my life, the one cloud of doom which circumscribes my life is the odour of myself.

  There’s no trying to pinpoint it. The usual sniff under the armpits or cupping of palms in front of my mouth to catch the smell of my breath is like trying to scoop an iceberg with a goldfish net. And it’s not a simple condition of typical body odour. I mean, everybody has natural scents and
even the prettiest cover girls wear deodorant and perfume. It’s not the fact that I am fat that foul odours are trapped in the folds of my body. No, my problem is not a causal phenomenon and there are no simple answers.

  Perhaps I am misleading, calling myself a mall rat. It’s true I spend much of my time wandering in the subculture of gross material consumerism. I meander from store to store in the wake of my odour, but I seldom purchase anything I see inside the malls. Think, if you will, upon the word “rat.” Instantly, you’ll see a sharp-whiskered nose, beady black eyes, and an unsavoury disposition. Grubby hands with dirty fingernails, perhaps, and a waxy tail. You never actually think, FAT RAT. No, I’m sure what comes to mind is a more sneaky and thinner rodent. If I am a rat, think of, perhaps, the queen of all rats in the sewer of her dreams, being fed the most tender morsels of garbage flesh her minions bring her. Think of a well-fed rat with three mighty chins and smooth, smooth skin, pink and fine. No need for a fur covering when all your needs are met. A mighty rodent with more belly than breath, more girth than the diameter of the septic drains. If you think of such a rat, then I am that mighty beast.

  Actually, I had always thought of myself more in terms of a vole or perhaps a wise fat toad, or maybe even a manatee, mistaken by superstitious sailors as a bewitching mermaid. But, no. My mother tells me I was born in the Year of the Rat and that is that. No choice there, I’m afraid, and I can’t argue with what I can’t remember. Mother isn’t one for prolonged arguments and contemplative discussions. More often than not, all I’ll get is a “Jesus Christ!” for all my intellectual and moral efforts. I hope I don’t sound judgmental. Mother is a creature unto herself and there is no ground for arbitrary comparison. Each to their own is a common phrase, but not without a tidbit of truth.