Infinity Smashed: Savaged By Garbage
Feb. 19th, 2015 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeHello everybody! This was one of the winners of the Patreon Money Poll, and it was prompted by rolodexaspirin on LJ! Many thanks to my fine Patreon folks who sponsored this--contrapangloss, inurashii, hanasaseru, bmprager, cloudiah, Lydean, Jack, and Seamus! Happy Fearathon, and enjoy!
Savaged By Garbage
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Thomas gets a job cleaning out a home violating Treehouse sanitation norms, and realizes the situation is way worse than he realized. This is an Infinity Smashed story, but stand-alone.
Notes are at the end.
In Treehouse, where barely anyone was literate, the town criers were living billboards, phone directories, and newspapers. Different criers specialized in different things, but all possessed encyclopedic memories and clear signing.
From its perch on a branch, the labor crier declaimed, “Needed, citizens of diligence, good dexterity and no larger than my junior, for thorough clean out of Scrap Merchant’s house—”
The pay was whopping, but a shudder ran through the crowd. Still, Thomas raised his hand; he could use the money.
“No!” Thomas’s roommate Strong-Legs signed, yanking his head down with its mouth. “Don’t do it! I care for you!”
Thomas raised his hand again. “I can handle Scrap Merchant.”
Strong-Legs shuddered. “Suit yourself. I’m only glad I’m too big to fit.”
Thomas’s next warning was when he actually showed up for cleaning crew.
Not only was the bathhouse owner there (authority on sanitation), but so were two healers. Everyone looked grim, like they were planning to siege a castle rather than clean a house.
“Make sure you are wearing nothing you will wear again,” they signed. “This will be a multi-day job.”
Warning bells.
“Take a sack. All trash goes in the sack. Usable objects go here; if you’re unsure, check with us. When the sack is full, tie it off, put it here, and get a new sack. At shift end, go straight to the bathhouse; special baths have been set aside for you.”
Major warning bells.
“Scrap Merchant will try to interfere with your work. Ignore it. We will handle it. Good luck.”
Thomas pulled on his work gloves, grabbed a sack, and entered the house. Or rather, didn’t. The door was more a wall… of garbage. From floor to ceiling, broken salvage, rotten food, even bags of feces. Maggots and flies were everywhere. The smell was indescribable.
Thomas gagged, pulled his bandanna over his face, and one of the healers handed him a jar of ointment to smear around his nose. It didn’t fully block out the stench, but it helped. The smaller members of the cleaning crew squeezed in and started digging out a space in the entryway, and Thomas started bagging and hauling what he could reach.
Then Scrap Merchant came careening down the street.
“Harassment! Illicit entry! Theft!”
For a moment, Thomas worried there’d be an ugly scene, but the bath house owner and the healers took it aside. Still, Thomas could catch bits of the conversation out of the corner of his eye.
“How dare you!”
“—Numerous complaints—full process—“
“My treasures—my business!”
Finally, the smaller workers chiseled enough space for Thomas to actually get into the house, and they moved deeper in while he took over the entryway. At the top, the trash was mostly loose, but at the bottom, it’d calcified into layers of strata, and Thomas needed to chisel it loose.
That worked until halfway through his first pile, when Thomas hit some kind of fiber in the mess. When he tried to pull it loose, the whole stack came down on top of him.
It was undeniably the most disgusting thing Thomas had ever experienced. He was just lucky that it only buried him to mid-chest; the smaller cleaners might’ve been crushed wholesale. They rushed to dig him out.
The conversation with Scrap Merchant escalated. Thomas caught signs for, “Robbery,” “act of violence,” “tolerated this for years…”
Thomas got back to work. The faster he bagged this shit, the faster he could leave.
After a while, it became automatic—take pile, shove into sack, watch for strings. A huge pile of sacks amassed out front, far more than he ever would’ve thought could fit in such a house, and yet there was still more.
There wasn’t just crap in there either. Thomas and the cleaners also found fabric, woodcarvings, precious stones, musical instruments, works of art, tons of ancient sales records, all filthy. Almost all of it had to be tossed out—if they’d been useful once, they sure weren’t now.
Thomas couldn’t even be revolted anymore. He just felt weirdly sad. Scrap Merchant was having a meltdown, apparently unable to understand that there had been enough sanitation complaints about it to force even Treehouse’s sluggish legal machinery into action.
The sun was going down, the house was still full of garbage, and everyone called it a day.
Scrap Merchant wasn’t fuming anymore. It was curled into a miserable ball, shaking and rocking in front of its house.
“My home,” it kept signing, “my home…”
Thomas couldn’t bear to watch. He went to the bathhouse.
To his surprise, Strong-Legs was there waiting for him. Keeping a distance, it led him to the special bath—the decontamination bath, he now realized—plunked him down, and scrubbed him. Thomas was too exhausted and sore to resist. He’d had two more piles of garbage come down on him; he’d have to burn his clothes later.
“Tsk. Look at you, savaged by garbage,” Strong-Legs signed with its wings as it lugged hot water. “I hope you enjoy your folly money; you certainly earned it…”
“I don’t understand,” he signed. “Scrap Merchant… why?”
Strong-Legs ruffled its feathers, then handed him the bucket. “It is an immigrant too, like us.”
Thomas frowned. Strong-Legs tried again.
“Do you remember when you came here? How scared you were? You and me, we coped by making new families, new friends. Scrap Merchant made its family with things. The more family it has, the less scared it is. But it can never have enough family. This is the third clean-out since it came here.”
Thomas shivered, despite the hot water. “That’s crazy. Things can’t…” but then he thought about his teddy bear as a kid and just felt sadder. Worse, he felt unclean.
Seeing his upset, Strong-Legs dumped water on his head and took a big bite of his hair. “I like you!” It declared. “Even if you take terrible, terrible jobs. Learn your lesson from this.”
Thomas did. He never worked in a clean-out again.
Notes: Treehouse has a cumbersome complaints process for people who violate norms. Usually, people use mediation and private negotiation to avoid going through that process; it's extremely unpleasant for everyone involved. Unfortunately, mediation only works with people willing to change, which Scrap Merchant isn't.
It's one thing when a norms-violator is actively harming others. It's another when it's someone like Scrap Merchant, who's generally a decent person as long as you don't get between it and its things. Nobody wants to kick it out of the community or cause it pain, but they can't afford the disease risk or the fire hazard, since they live in a town where wood is the primary industry and building material. A strong-arm solution like the one being used here is pretty much guaranteed not to work for long; Scrap Merchant will just fill the house up again.
I drew inspiration from this story from the infamous Collyer Brothers. Hoarding for Scrap Merchant is a way of maintaing structure and familiarity in an alien world, but hoarding can happen in humans for myriad reasons. If you're interested in learning more, maybe check out Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost.
Savaged By Garbage
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Thomas gets a job cleaning out a home violating Treehouse sanitation norms, and realizes the situation is way worse than he realized. This is an Infinity Smashed story, but stand-alone.
Notes are at the end.
In Treehouse, where barely anyone was literate, the town criers were living billboards, phone directories, and newspapers. Different criers specialized in different things, but all possessed encyclopedic memories and clear signing.
From its perch on a branch, the labor crier declaimed, “Needed, citizens of diligence, good dexterity and no larger than my junior, for thorough clean out of Scrap Merchant’s house—”
The pay was whopping, but a shudder ran through the crowd. Still, Thomas raised his hand; he could use the money.
“No!” Thomas’s roommate Strong-Legs signed, yanking his head down with its mouth. “Don’t do it! I care for you!”
Thomas raised his hand again. “I can handle Scrap Merchant.”
Strong-Legs shuddered. “Suit yourself. I’m only glad I’m too big to fit.”
Thomas’s next warning was when he actually showed up for cleaning crew.
Not only was the bathhouse owner there (authority on sanitation), but so were two healers. Everyone looked grim, like they were planning to siege a castle rather than clean a house.
“Make sure you are wearing nothing you will wear again,” they signed. “This will be a multi-day job.”
Warning bells.
“Take a sack. All trash goes in the sack. Usable objects go here; if you’re unsure, check with us. When the sack is full, tie it off, put it here, and get a new sack. At shift end, go straight to the bathhouse; special baths have been set aside for you.”
Major warning bells.
“Scrap Merchant will try to interfere with your work. Ignore it. We will handle it. Good luck.”
Thomas pulled on his work gloves, grabbed a sack, and entered the house. Or rather, didn’t. The door was more a wall… of garbage. From floor to ceiling, broken salvage, rotten food, even bags of feces. Maggots and flies were everywhere. The smell was indescribable.
Thomas gagged, pulled his bandanna over his face, and one of the healers handed him a jar of ointment to smear around his nose. It didn’t fully block out the stench, but it helped. The smaller members of the cleaning crew squeezed in and started digging out a space in the entryway, and Thomas started bagging and hauling what he could reach.
Then Scrap Merchant came careening down the street.
“Harassment! Illicit entry! Theft!”
For a moment, Thomas worried there’d be an ugly scene, but the bath house owner and the healers took it aside. Still, Thomas could catch bits of the conversation out of the corner of his eye.
“How dare you!”
“—Numerous complaints—full process—“
“My treasures—my business!”
Finally, the smaller workers chiseled enough space for Thomas to actually get into the house, and they moved deeper in while he took over the entryway. At the top, the trash was mostly loose, but at the bottom, it’d calcified into layers of strata, and Thomas needed to chisel it loose.
That worked until halfway through his first pile, when Thomas hit some kind of fiber in the mess. When he tried to pull it loose, the whole stack came down on top of him.
It was undeniably the most disgusting thing Thomas had ever experienced. He was just lucky that it only buried him to mid-chest; the smaller cleaners might’ve been crushed wholesale. They rushed to dig him out.
The conversation with Scrap Merchant escalated. Thomas caught signs for, “Robbery,” “act of violence,” “tolerated this for years…”
Thomas got back to work. The faster he bagged this shit, the faster he could leave.
After a while, it became automatic—take pile, shove into sack, watch for strings. A huge pile of sacks amassed out front, far more than he ever would’ve thought could fit in such a house, and yet there was still more.
There wasn’t just crap in there either. Thomas and the cleaners also found fabric, woodcarvings, precious stones, musical instruments, works of art, tons of ancient sales records, all filthy. Almost all of it had to be tossed out—if they’d been useful once, they sure weren’t now.
Thomas couldn’t even be revolted anymore. He just felt weirdly sad. Scrap Merchant was having a meltdown, apparently unable to understand that there had been enough sanitation complaints about it to force even Treehouse’s sluggish legal machinery into action.
The sun was going down, the house was still full of garbage, and everyone called it a day.
Scrap Merchant wasn’t fuming anymore. It was curled into a miserable ball, shaking and rocking in front of its house.
“My home,” it kept signing, “my home…”
Thomas couldn’t bear to watch. He went to the bathhouse.
To his surprise, Strong-Legs was there waiting for him. Keeping a distance, it led him to the special bath—the decontamination bath, he now realized—plunked him down, and scrubbed him. Thomas was too exhausted and sore to resist. He’d had two more piles of garbage come down on him; he’d have to burn his clothes later.
“Tsk. Look at you, savaged by garbage,” Strong-Legs signed with its wings as it lugged hot water. “I hope you enjoy your folly money; you certainly earned it…”
“I don’t understand,” he signed. “Scrap Merchant… why?”
Strong-Legs ruffled its feathers, then handed him the bucket. “It is an immigrant too, like us.”
Thomas frowned. Strong-Legs tried again.
“Do you remember when you came here? How scared you were? You and me, we coped by making new families, new friends. Scrap Merchant made its family with things. The more family it has, the less scared it is. But it can never have enough family. This is the third clean-out since it came here.”
Thomas shivered, despite the hot water. “That’s crazy. Things can’t…” but then he thought about his teddy bear as a kid and just felt sadder. Worse, he felt unclean.
Seeing his upset, Strong-Legs dumped water on his head and took a big bite of his hair. “I like you!” It declared. “Even if you take terrible, terrible jobs. Learn your lesson from this.”
Thomas did. He never worked in a clean-out again.
Notes: Treehouse has a cumbersome complaints process for people who violate norms. Usually, people use mediation and private negotiation to avoid going through that process; it's extremely unpleasant for everyone involved. Unfortunately, mediation only works with people willing to change, which Scrap Merchant isn't.
It's one thing when a norms-violator is actively harming others. It's another when it's someone like Scrap Merchant, who's generally a decent person as long as you don't get between it and its things. Nobody wants to kick it out of the community or cause it pain, but they can't afford the disease risk or the fire hazard, since they live in a town where wood is the primary industry and building material. A strong-arm solution like the one being used here is pretty much guaranteed not to work for long; Scrap Merchant will just fill the house up again.
I drew inspiration from this story from the infamous Collyer Brothers. Hoarding for Scrap Merchant is a way of maintaing structure and familiarity in an alien world, but hoarding can happen in humans for myriad reasons. If you're interested in learning more, maybe check out Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost.
