I’d lived in Stinktown practically my whole life and, to me, it barely even stunk anymore. I was used to the lifestyle. In Stinktown, we scavenged for trash. That was our big industry. We’d sift through huge mounds of garbage, searching for stuff we could use for trading purposes. Most of the entertainment was trash based: dumpster diving, dumpster dining, dumpster screwing. Anything you could do in a dumpster, we did it.
But there was only so much garbage you could look at in a day before the nausea kicked in, so when Grasper found the nasal spray, mostly everyone was intrigued. Stilts and his crew nearly confiscated the spray until old Graspy paid up the usual bribe: three rubber duckies. None of us were sure why Stilts, the biggest bully in all of Stinktown, collected the duckies, but it likely had something to do with his childhood and the way his mom drowned due to the whole defective life raft fiasco. So many drownings back then. My cousin, Filbert, drowned as a matter of fact. His raft never inflated even though he blew and blew into the tube, eventually sinking brick-like into the rising tides. That could have been any of us. But we’d been lucky, sort of, in that we were lifted up out of the sea into the Resettlement Schooners.
Then that nasal spray came along, mucking everything up. It was random what made me decide to try it. As a kid, before the evacuations and all that, I used to have this medicine—Flonase—for my asthma. Since then, of course, I’ve had the regular attacks. I was remembering how the spray used to help, and I thought maybe this was the same kind of spray, even though the Flonase bottle was purple while this bottle was just a faded, yellowish white. So, Graspy, who knows how bad my asthma can get, graciously gave me the first inhale—us being friends and Stinktown being a place where people look out for one another. Even that jerk Stilts had his place on the Town Watch as a kind of feudal knight, except he didn’t have much in the way of honor and was dirt poor like the rest of us.
I’ve snorted a lot of things since settling down in Stinktown—jugs of turpentine, dried marker tips, crushed-up Tylenol—but none of that prepared me for the nasal spray. When it entered my nostrils, I felt an immediate sort of unplugging, as if the spray exploded the dammed canal of my nose. Suddenly, I smelled myself with incredible clarity: think putrefying whale flesh, dank bat guano, and a little burning cat piss thrown in. It was like getting clubbed on the head, something I’ve mostly been able to avoid given the relative peace and prosperity of Stinktown versus the Unincorporated Lands.
My gag reflex, which had tamped down over the years, came back with a vengeance. After vomiting my guts out, Graspy took me back to my little shack on the north end of the garbage pile. But home was unbearable. Where before it had this cozy coffee grinds and banana peels scent, now it smelled of rotten eggs, barf, and that time Dad got a major fungal infection. Graspy wiped the sweat off my brow with an acrid-smelling rag.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked.
“Wish I knew,” he said, eyes glistening with affection.
Since Mom and Dad passed from what I’m assuming was undiagnosed cancer, Graspy had become a sort of uncle to me. He’d led me through my tumultuous adolescence, the hard realization that life from before—the life of school and rec soccer games and Chick-fil-A afterwards—was over. He’d got me set up in Stinktown as a Plastics Smelter and helped me bury my parents in one of the disposal pits. He wasn’t even a creep, never expected anything from me. He was just a decent guy from our Resettlement Schooner whose estranged daughter lived in what was once Wyoming. Given his sparse set of teeth, Graspy had this whistling quality to his voice. I’d never noticed before how utterly disgusting his breath stank. I turned my face from him, breathing heavily through my mouth as the tears streamed. I couldn’t stand another minute in the reeking place that was my beloved home.
That night, Graspy saw me off, handing me two items wrapped in masking tape.
“I can’t accept,” I said.
“You can,” he said. “I’ve been saving them for something special.”
After some hesitation, I unpeeled the tape. It was a toothbrush in its original plastic packaging, along with a half-squeezed tube of Crest.
“Figured I didn’t need it,” he said, opening his cavity-ravaged mouth.
I stared down at the gifts. “I’ll never be happy again,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said. “It’ll pass. You’ll just have to be patient.”
I held my breath and gave Graspy a hug. Then I set out into the Unincorporated Lands. After a few days of avoiding the various gangs of cannibals, I found myself a little plot of dirt in the woods where I could build an inconspicuous lean-to shelter. I scavenged for mustard greens, picked over carrion, boiled water, and brushed my teeth.
At the end of each month, I risked trekking to the edge of Stinktown, trying to catch a glimpse of someone before the first whiff of dog shit struck my nose.
I lived this lonely existence until, one shining day in March, the outskirts of Stinktown no longer stank. Or, rather, the stench was one that I’d come to find endurable.
Cautiously, I stepped back through the entrance garbage piles.
“Stop right there,” Stilts said, in his snarliest voice. But then he saw me and came running in for a hug. “You’re back!” he exclaimed. “Word was you got sick?”
“Must have passed,” I said. “Guess I love this place too much.”
Stilts put his arm around me. “One man’s trash,” he said.
Matt Goldberg's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of literary journals and magazines, including Coolest American Stories, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, Pif Magazine, Entropy, The Hoosier Review, and others. He is also a winner of The Arcanist's 2021 Hunger Flash contest. Matt earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Temple University and lives in South Philadelphia with his partner and their two fancy rats. He can be found on Twitter @mattmgoldberg.