Ritual. The word associates her quiet, unseen actions, with the gathering lining up before the rising sun. The living breath of democracy brings together the line of voters watched by the young woman who knows herself, thinks of herself, as Merriwyn. A sixth sense brings her here to observe. Perhaps she’s meant to admire a diversity of people in her community, waiting for the chance to answer the call to choose those responsible for American government. Peaches Belmonte still waits for the day she can vote, too.
The early morning of activity revives the tone of her inner self. This part of her sense of being intuitively knows, and craves, actions unwitnessed, especially while passing public places. What she witnesses, makes it her own. She wondered once, a little, what would be her diagnosis, but really, let it be. She’d say ‘You have to have space, for being yourself.’ It is her personal ritual, in these moments of private witnessing, to think of herself as ‘Merriwyn.’ ‘Merriwyn.’ A magical my-name, name. ‘Merriwyn’ was a name that came to her before sunrise one morning, as she tended her east-facing plants, paused by a ripsalis by the window of early light. She was seven years old.
“Merriwyn,” she thinks, “no stranger to enigmas with life-and-death consequences. I want only to awaken, in this bleeding-edge time, emanations of magic. I can watch the impossible happen. OK. I call Peace to the East” A good feeling inside makes it possible to calmly watch the people, cueing up here where their wait might take hours. It reveals to her a good spirit among them, too. .There is lot of anger to go around the polling places, in those, too, who did not radiate it so palpably. For now, there was, at least, the voice in a vote. Am I being judgmental? I call Peace to the South. I love my emotions. They are the shelter and comfort in my body. They make the place I truly Live..
I look at the world, open to new information. Not only a projection of accrued prejudices. Skin color, or who you love or how you came to be. Not how much money that did or didn’t give you: whatever they told her about people, they didn’t trigger hatred. I call Peace to the West.
I don’t welcome just any attitude into my relationships, though.
But- if not an aura of evil, a clearly domineering intent simmers in the three huge-truck-driving loads of men – and one woman – who rev their engines noisily as they guzzle gallons of gas, as is their right. Some people DO imagine they’re Top Shit. It’s rare enough to really stand out.
But what am I here to witness? Merriwyn thinks. I call Peace to the North.
Maybe it’s a more general sense of resentment, and nothing weird, just…an edge..I call Awen Above, protect this place. She cringes as some hungry voter’s hamburger wrapper crinkles by. She decides not to be uptight about it.
I call Awen below to protect this place. Dispose of it myself, OK, she thinks.
The voters in line are either properly impressed, or just think the group were run-of-the-mill assholes. She sees things, she acknowledges who is there, who seeks attention, who wants to inspect the voters or the voting. . Yet now her own sense of serenity, if not a tickling amount of jubilation, already permeates this area.. That sense of the future, though.
I call Awen within…protect this place.
The way hints of good direction and impressions of a far future better time have come to her so personally, occupying her. Kolpar, she calls it. Truly Better World. Real. But still an idea arriving. Awareness can empower, but with this may come intimations of Fear. She hadn’t attracted undue sinister attitudes. She’d consciously begun freeing her life of wannabe-controllers and manipulators. This made it easier to see things as they were, in fact. What people really feel is becoming clear, and clearly, also, not confused with her own serene witness. In the light of Truth came her opportunity to walk straight into, essentially, Dream. This past summer, reality had perilously bent by magic for hours. Yet, she got those children all home. She won. Of all the peculiar intimacies of her private strange world, that was the day, the unreal established itself with reality. When these self-congratulatory specimens stride up through the church, they have no intention of voting here. They have already cast a ballot for their man. On that day, they also waited for the opportunity to demand the people conducting the voting process to let them see things- make sure nothing corrupt is happening.
The mail-in ballot doubters feel confident: Nothing should be fake about these votes. So, the problem would then be, people there voting who didn’t belong. How had they uncovered anything fraudulent? They drank a lot of actual muscadine moonshine, while hunting. They had taken seriously what their Man, their rock star, their superhero, their stick-it-to-the-Establisment emissary. A storm is coming.
The boys didn’t show up drunk this time. Maybe they didn’t care about public intoxication. But if they were jailed for doing what the leader of the free world said, there were hard, proud words. In their distraction, they are, themselves, a distraction. In their minds, they are an intimidating sight. Most carry on, some comment, and no one leaves the line.
Merriwyn foresees: they are here for show- perhaps to scare away any criminal sorts they imagined, coming within sight of their sentry. She knows law enforcement is unlikely to say anything to them – their flags in the trunks of their trucks include one that says Blue Lives Matter, an American flag without the red. If no one else complains the right way, then hey: they are clearly just standing there. If the law wants them to go back to their trucks, of course they will. They aren’t the rioters and looters, like those other people across America’s cities. Their guy would never lose to that loser other guy, who would screw up the Winning. This was clear: In their minds, They have the right to go in and look in them machines. They done talked about this. They have the right to watch who comes in and out when the votes are counted. They are still Free, White, and 21 in America. As if sneezed away, the facial tissue drifts off the back of one of the trucks. A piece of saw-dusted timber; a tennis ball that lost its bounce and then its owner; a piece of paper once billing announcements of community interest; a crushed Coke can. Trash for which no one has taken responsibility. Across the street, a man is poised to dumpster-dive for copper wire to recycle, to pay for his daughter’s private school tuition. Who cares what these people think? Suddenly he breaks from his reverie. The copper scraps roll out, apparently of their own accord, missing his fingers by inches. These objects, randomly scattered and devoid of meaning, evoke a sense of dread in Merriwyn. She could record a Tik Tok, show how the trouble takes form, so clearly alarmed and urgent. Hey, look, Chaos on Cue! Premiering now. Before almost anyone would believe it, viewers would marvel: how did someone get this looking real? Some might even laugh, and few would be bored. Some would get a little fucked up and watch it again. One piece of debris, then, apparently, the pick of all the litter, tumbles along with gravity’s pull. That is nothing too exceptional – it is mundane, and humdrum, to notice an excess of trash scattered around a polling place. Upon closer inspection, it composes of itself a marionette of the insistent wind. Yet the white, two-handled shopping bag cavorts now like an Adventure Time cartoon refugee, dancing into an alarming amount of garbage clearly animated in a way that defies nature. “Some people act as though trash collects itself,” muses Peaches. And then -
“Never have I ever…”
She finds that funny. Such a party game question. Maybe she’ll live to play games.
The reaction of every rational person standing in line outside involves a lonely disbelief. Nothing so uncanny is ever seen by more than one person. People generally don’t pay a thought to garbage. The depressing reality, however, is the contribution of random thoughtless citizens which has given rise to a quasi-humanoid figure from edges of nightmares. What they begin to see, their minds will refuse.
Like any decent person, she doesn’t want anyone hurt by a panic. Because she is Merriwyn, she risks all, for the first time, to meet, understand, banish a hostile incarnation. There’s no other choice, is there? She recalls the Sphere of Protection, the peace called to the four quarters of Earth, feels serenity in the face of this grotequerie. Before it completes its form, She knows it by its intent. She knows no supernatural control over that, but she does recognize it as an evolutionary breakthrough. A science is at pla, beyond what had been possible. And why would anyone make—this? Was this a recycling experiment, gone wild?
What can I do, that no one else, can? Just, Not Run Screaming?
. But if one of us can run up there and kick the crap out of it, an emotional tide will turn.
Clear enough to Peaches-playing-Merriwyn. Clear, too: on the sidewalk into the voting booths of West Caring Baptist Church, crawls the kind of thing you try to pull people away from.
The garbage being churns, huffles its trash across the ground. There seems a clear sense of disgust in most anyone who sees ‘him’, but that is the ballast, that holds the mind from capsizing on a wave of sheer disbelief. Merriwyn would barrel forward- and that’s what Peaches does. Run straight in the direction of something Absurd and Terrifying. For some, the sight of that rushing girl, met with a bulky slap, hard and quick, whipping her in the other direction, makes it too frightful to watch any more.
Others realize she’s been thrown in their direction. To their credit, three people try to catch her, but one guy’s eyes are closed. Her momentum is enough to knock down the biggest of the interweaved bystanders- turned-responders. She hits him with the force of a linebacker.
But still she gets to her feet, swaying.
“Do you need to stand up? Do you need to sit down?” asks the dazed ex-football player. The crowd’s attention is fixed on the living statue of garbage, which attempts to talk. Its protest echo clearly from its mind-so it believes. “That’s a hostile reaction to someone you don’t even know!” Pieces of trash start to spew from the thing’s head, toward the crowd.
“Do you think, if I was an illegal, standing in line to cast a fake ballot, you would even bat an eye?” The garbage being turns its apparent ‘head’ towards Peaches, as she strides steadily up, again.
“I really can’t believe you saw me coming. That’s never happened before.” The smaller pieces of trash fling as far as their meager weight can take them, but the heavier stuff makes a projectile, backing up everyone. The pile of refuse sneers. “I’ve wanted someone to face me for a long time. Thanks for playing!” The crowd can barely hear a thing over the clamor of the flying trash.
The thing pauses speaking. It assumes a unique body language, a very confident stance, satisfied in being right and powerful. It continues: “You’d be offering me a bottled water!” A bread bag, a diaper, an empty bottle of motor oil – where had all this come from? Now it spews violently off the grounds of West Caring Baptist’s parking lot.
Convinced early voting now had a scare to remember, the creature depletes its mass of rubbish further. It stalks away, diminishing, mocking: “Covid! Covid! Covid!” The word, if it ever made sense as a word, dies away in clanks and rustles.
Whatever remains of its integrity has been further junked, and for whatever reason, the creature takes nothing that it spewed during its speech, back. Litter is everywhere. Soon it blows down Park Hill Avenue, like loose trappings that might come off the back of a truck.
By now, these disappearances were actually a calculated use of its power and limitations. With the bulk of its mass gone, a smaller part of the garbage could take it out of sight, and from there, it would be easy enough to drift on to other garbage. Trash is the one thing modern America produces in abundance.
If anyone had ever followed the creature, no one had ever tracked and contained it. Eventually it would disappear, another casualty in of the one class of thing our society wants most to ignore: trash. A simple receptacle could lend enough of a body to accomplish movement and some activity. That form always got it to a full dumpster, somehow. Yet the landfills often made good places to sit and reflect – to remind the unique creature of the wealth it has found, in deplorable material things.
But no one had ever tracked it down. At least, no one who lived to tell the tale.
No one else, that is, except for the young woman who chose to be Merriwyn. As she keeps pace with the “blowing trash” – no one else pays the fiend any mind, why would they? – she knows it will be nearly impossible.
Already, she thinks of Spider-Man, in terms of dogged stamina to hound the pile of trash that hit her so hard. Her sixth sense is the only thing showing her the pattern. The creature’s escape was like the ultimate full card monte: an untrained eye wouldn’t stand a chance.
The pursuit of the nearly imperceptible intruder calls for focus. She pulls up her phone, bypasses Tik-Tok notifications about new baby announcement videos, and records a snippet of her location.It’s no hunt made for conventional thinking. The fear of insanity would dog any determined person, who believes they sense a line over believing in the impossible. As it is, with AI and playlist culture bubbles, well, welcome to an age of ever-plausible deniablity, for those who don't seem to mind lying.
The person she has been falls away. She realizes herself as a more perfect futuristic self. A bicycle is only an imaginary sort of star craft, but this radical self-actualization, buoyed by pumping adrenaline and pedals, turns the chain of events, with Merriwyn, possessed, never more than a glance, lost. As soon as nothing seems to coalesce, she feels very near to levitating. Then, the pattern becomes unmistakable.
She puts her bicycle down in the grass, outside the county landfill, four miles from the polling area. Here, the sheer amount of trash makes a virtual blind in which to hide a ‘man’ made of garbage. She walks in among the piles of rubbish, knowing she is in the open – a possible target. But she is correct – the creature is not yet aware of her. She holds this one advantage.. What she doesn't notice: another human being, very nearby, has also tracked the bizarre assailant. “Hey!” comes the hoarse whisper. “What are you doing here?” She tries to pinpoint the voice, and registers a handwave from the speaker.
“Get out of here! You don’t belong.”
She is sure this is not the creature speaking, although her hammering heart betrays her nervous edge.
But words. She can make out words. The monster only spews garbage. Trash Talk.
She shakes her head, no. She continues, stalking the lair of the unique beast.
Want to find out what happens? Get in touch! I am meanwhile looking for the best way to share the story. I'd love to film this in social media content form...any of it at all would be so cool! Happy Halloween, Be Chill, cease ill
