Prima Nocta

It doesn't happen how you think it does.

You're probably strung out, ducked into the wrong alley to hit the pipe. It waited there, watching you, biding time until you were good and fucked before ripping a new hole in your throat. Maybe your thigh if it's in a rush. You spray out all over the wall, all over yourself, all over it. You just see yellow eyes, fucking foot-long tongue lapping you up, and then nothing.

But then, something. Maybe you smell dogshit, old take-out containers, dried-out tampons and whatever else people threw away along with you. You reach up and around, wipe the maggots off your face. You find a door up there, push it open. Daylight. It feels like a blowtorch on your hand, and you smell your skin bubbling away as the  lid falls closed.

No, you didn't smell it. You tasted it. Tasted your skin burning, just like you're tasting this dumpster and the filth you're swimming in.

Maybe you sleep.

Maybe you wake up just in time to hear the truck grab hold of your roach motel and up-end you and the rest of the garbage into its belly. Maybe you go for a ride in darkness and smells - no, tastes - even worse than before. If you're really lucky, maybe you get compacted, hear your bones snap and your eyes pop out of their sockets, your tongue sliced clean off by your teeth. But it's like it happened to the guy next to you. You hear it, you know you should be screaming, but you don't. You don't even feel like it.

Maybe you rumble along for a while, compressed into a neat package, until the truck dumps you out, in an even bigger pile. Then the bulldozer, and you're crushed again, probably pretty well pulped by now.

And then it's quiet. Might even rain a little. You can hear the drops pattering on the layers of garbage around you. After a while, you can move a finger. Then a hand. Then the other hand. Maybe you can feel your tongue getting longer again. You knees snap back to how they were, your neck no longer craned backward. Your skull pops out like a plastic water bottle getting air.

Soon you're you again, or as you as you ever were. You risk digging, and you do this for a while, until you taste the rain. You drag yourself up from the garbage until you're standing there with rain and shit and blood and the forgotten leavings of a dying city sliding off you in clumps.

You're hungry. That isn't even the right word for it, but coming up with a better word isn't important. What is important is that tiny flare of yellow light that you spot across the dunes of the landfill. A cigarette. Your tongue slides out between your lips and licks the air. You taste the tobacco, and the rain-drenched swamp-ass of the guy smoking it. You hear his heart, forcing thin blood through clogged arteries.

He's gonna die anyway. It just doesn't happen the way he thought it would.

Maybe you finish the job. Or maybe instead you stumble off in that first-feed drunken miasma, steaming red, to find a discarded refrigerator to spend the day in.

Maybe the trash man wakes up hungry, too.