Out of This Stony Rubbish

Yeah. He pumps, eyes scrunching shut. Yeah.

None of them work. There's an old woman living in the trash and she stinks, the whole pile stinks like oil and dead green things, she herself smells sour and salty, greasy, hot. She watches him dig, a lantern held up against the rushing dusk. She tries to speak and nothing comes out, no sound, her lips moving in the silence. One of the laptops is intact. He pulls it out from beneath a broken television, CRT smashed. He opens it up. The smooth black screen stares back at him, stares into him.

His face gets hot. Things wake up and turn over in his groin.

"I'm gonna," he murmurs. "I'm gonna."