Thrives in the Waste
The heat oozed through the windows and pooled behind Scott’s blackout curtains. If he sat still, hunched over his desk, he could stay cool enough to think.
Scott’s home office was dim, every lamp left off in favor of the roaring air conditioner that hissed tepid air through its bared teeth.
Half-filled applications glowed primly on his computer screen. He would get to them today, he promised himself, the same promise as the day before and the weeks before that, every day since the startup had gone under.
He would not get to them. By the end of the day, he would not even be Scott anymore.
His eyes were dry and glazed, stinging as he rubbed them, colors bursting behind his eyelids: black-red, blue-gold, a green that hurt.
Scott made his way into the kitchen, which was sweaty and dank-smelling. Dishes filled the sink, and Scott did not look at them. He scooped handfuls of cereal into his mouth. Outside, the neighbor’s rhododendrons waved red blossoms into the boiled-looking air.
Scott looked at the closed fridge, considered drinking juice, considered drinking soda, but failed to see if he had either.
A muffled chime sounded from the counter. His phone, buried under mail.
A month ago, a thrill of hope would have shot through him. You’ll bounce right back, his coworkers had said to him as they packed up the office. Everyone’s hiring.
After the first two dozen applications, he’d woken one day with his bones turned to lead and his thoughts drowned out by static. He hadn’t applied anywhere in weeks.
A notification blinked up at him: Heath, his sister’s husband. His only friend outside of work. Now, maybe, his only friend.
What’re you up to today?
Heath was a doctor and an optimist. He’d texted almost daily since the layoff, a kind concern that made Scott feel queasy and undeserving.
The text went on to offer Scott beer and a hundred dollars to clear the blackberry brambles from Heath’s garden.
Scott stood still. The gray light of the apartment seeped up from the carpet and into his skin.
Sure, he typed and pressed send.
Heath and Rebecca’s house was not large, but it radiated grandness from under a giant oak tree in the back garden. Scott parked his car in the sunbaked driveway and hurried inside, sweating already.
Heath was on the couch with no shoes on. He handed Scott a beer as they walked through the crisply cool house.
“I’m on call today,” Heath said. “Otherwise, I’d cut down the blackberries myself. I promised Bec. You’re a lifesaver.”
They looked through the sliding door at the back of the house. A vent blew softly chilled air over Scott’s ankles. A vase full of lavender stood on the kitchen table.
“It grew fast this year,” Heath said, pointing outside. “I guess we didn’t notice.”
The garden shimmered green behind the glass. Where the oak’s branches extended, blue shade soaked the lawn. But the oak did not stretch to the far, bright corner. There, a sprawling blackberry bramble stretched its crazy limbs. The breeze did not move them.
“Too fast,” Heath muttered.
He handed tools to Scott: shears, a trowel, a pair of yellowing gloves.
Scott slipped through the door, sliding it closed behind him. He turned, but Heath had disappeared back into the house. The garden reflected itself in the glass.
Scott made his way across the back lawn and stood at the edge of the oak’s shade. Beyond it, the flowers and herbs had wilted and curled. Rhubarb stalks tipped horizontal and lay rotting. Dandelions had shriveled before they could flower. Even the outer leaves of the oak drooped and shrank from the beating sun.
But not the blackberry bramble. The bush piled and splayed, a deep verdant mass folding over itself in the center and sending its chartreuse canes in every direction. They clung to the back fence. They tangled around themselves like hair. At each cane’s end, grouped tendrils shot like fingers, reaching.
Brittle white flowers fluttered on various stalks. On some, hard green berry clusters clung to spiny stems. On others, berries had already swollen to a deep purple that vibrated in the humid light. The fruited briers swayed gently back and forth against the breeze and seemed for a moment to reach their tendrilled tips toward him.
He looked back at the silent house. He wiped a thin slick of perspiration from his face, and it soaked his sleeve.
Lazy, he thought to himself, and the scorn turned his sweat sour on his lip.
The too-small gloves suffocated his hands, but he kept them on. He did not want to touch the brambles.
He found that the gloves held the thorned brambles well, and he was pleased to see that the reaching green canes yielded easily to pruning shears. Soon, Scott had amassed shorn briers around his feet, lurid green against the grass. Petals clung to the blades.
He avoided the brambles that had borne fruit.
The outer canes cut down; Scott grew more confident that he could tear out the bush entirely before heat overtook him. Only the thicket remained, twisted and dark green. Here were the clusters of fat, purple berries.
As Scott leaned in, the scent of the fruit hit him at last: syrup and jam, dark and warm. But something else, also. An artificial sweetness, a chemical edge. He plucked one from its cluster.
It glistened in the sun, but even in the leafy shade, there was a glow to the fruit, an inner light that gleamed from between the little globes.
Scott blinked. Sweat filmed his eyes and blew out the edges of the shapes in front of him, everything wreathed and emanating. He dropped the berry into the grass.
Scott hurried to cut at the thicker canes and reached further into the thicket to where the woody stalks met the ground. Even the leaves were barbed here in the heart of the plant, and they scratched shallow cuts into his forearms. Scott breathed through his mouth. The smell of the berries now surrounded him, and he felt a heave of nausea if he took too deep a breath. But still, the perfume cloyed the air and coated his tongue. He grasped at the briers, each more gnarled than the last, hacking at them with the shears until they split and tore, oozing a translucent sap that ran down the stalks to the ground.
When he got to the last, thickest bramble, he stopped. His breath caught. Heat came off the plant, and the air seemed to shimmer with its sick-sweet smell. Scott felt the sweat turn tepid and gray on his skin, his mouth filled with liquid, and his eyes slid in their sockets; the nausea was no longer containable.
He clenched back bile in his throat and gouged at the soil around the thickest stalk. It was packed and hard as concrete. He chipped out a few desiccated pieces of dirt with the trowel before falling back, panting.
He would have to stop, he thought. He needed water. He’d have to finish it later.
Pathetic, he thought to himself, and, unbidden, the memory of Heath’s beaming smile as he handed Scott and the startup’s co-founder their first seed money came to mind. He’d never paid Heath back.
Scott peeled the sticky gloves from his hands and felt momentary relief from the heat. He looked around the simmering yard. A pickaxe leaned against the shed, and he reached for it, the wooden handle rough on his bare hands.
Scott cursed under his breath as he hacked at the ground. He felt hot saliva pool, dripping down his chin as the axe found purchase in the clods of packed earth. It grew hotter. He worked fast.
He did not let himself stop until he felt the root ball unearth itself. Dust sparkled as he reached down to rip the tangle from the soil, and he dropped it with a gasp, huddling his burned hand to his chest. The root ball smoked on the dry ground, stinking of charred carbon and that same poison, magnified.
Scott swore, his voice garbled in his ears as though distorted by the heat, and fell back on his heels. The root ball was shrinking, burning itself away to nothing from the inside until finally it snuffed out of existence entirely, leaving a scorched divot in the earth and a stinking haze.
Scott crawled back into the oak’s shade, a sick roiling in his gut, and half-stumbled back to the sliding glass door where Heath was waiting, a look of concern on his face.
“Jesus, Scotty,” he said, standing back to let Scott in.
The air-conditioned room pumped oxygen back into Scott’s lungs. He took gulps of air, registering how dirty or crazed he must look by Heath’s expression.
“Done,” he gasped.
“I was just coming to get you,” Heath said, apologetic. “The city put out a heat advisory. It’s not safe to be outside.”
Scott shook his head, swallowing down the last waves of nausea.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I got it.”
But Heath was frowning at the hand Scott still clutched to his chest.
“Thorns get you?” he asked.
The truth sent another heave through Scott’s throat, and he shook his head.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a scratch.”
He refused Heath’s offered bandage, keeping his clenched fist out of sight as Heath brought him another beer. Scott could barely manage a sip. Heath insisted on a glass of water, a cold shower, and a change of clothes. Scott let the water stream out of the guest bathroom’s showerhead and over his shivering body, willing himself not to throw up on the gleaming tile. He felt like he had a fever. His left hand throbbed from the circular wound that looked like neither burn nor puncture but something else.
Heath insisted he stay for dinner, but Scott refused as politely as he could, repulsed at the thought of food. He stumbled to his truck in Heath’s borrowed sweatpants and T-shirt. He promised to call later when Rebecca was home and he felt better. Heath frowned from the porch.
Scott held his throbbing hand to the truck’s blasting air-conditioning vent as he drove, trying not to notice the thin rivulets of steam coming from beneath the bandage on his palm.
“Thanks for leaving us a mess in the yard,” Rebecca chided as she picked up the phone.
“Sorry,” Scott said. He could hear how strange his voice sounded—runny, oozing in the back of his throat.
“Kidding,” she said. “Heath said you stabbed yourself on the blackberries and that you probably got heat exhaustion, so it sounds like we’re even.”
Scott looked at his hand. The wound had grown and distended. A two-inch oval of red, flayed flesh stretched over his palm, as though his skin had been fileted away from the inside, leaving only a thin membrane between his bleeding tissues and the air. The initial burn still hurt, but it had dulled as the wound spread. Scott closed and opened his fist around it. Heat pulsed up his forearm.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You sound—”
“Just tired,” he said, his voice working on its own, a pre-recorded thought. “See you later.”
He put the phone on the table and did not pick it up again.
Scott forgot to eat dinner.
He lost track of time as he stood in the middle of his kitchen, staring at the lesion on his palm as it spread. It was just fast enough that if he looked away for a moment, the peeled-away section had grown a millimeter by the time he looked back. Warmth radiated from his hand as though he held a hot ember, but the hand itself felt cool.
Motion and sound seemed to stop around him, even his thoughts quieting. He should call Heath, he thought; the wound was not normal. But the idea floated up through his consciousness and blinked itself away. Another thought, minutes later: necrosis, flesh-eating bacteria. And these, too, drifted toward and past him. He watched the flesh melt red-violet up his arm and was relieved.
At sunset, the streetlight came on outside his kitchen window, and Scott looked up, realizing he had not thought to breathe.
He drifted through the dark apartment and into his bedroom, where he lay still and calm on the twisted sheets. His phone chimed from the kitchen several times and then was silent. He slept without dreaming or moving except once: to reach with his changed arm to the groaning air conditioner and switch it off. The heat had left his body.
Scott sat down at his laptop at six the next morning.
A smell hung in the silent apartment: char and a burned chemical fume thick with poison. The bed still smoldered, bits of blackened, twisted plastic around the oblong hole where Scott’s body had bored through the mattress and bed frame like superheated steel.
His left arm hovered over the keyboard, each fingertip pulsing. It was not right to call it an arm, Scott realized, as he regarded its sleek cords and sinews, the dark ooze that pulsed through it beneath the membrane. It was not right to regard it as an appendage at all, in the same way that a head is not an appendage because it contains the self.
The arm regarded Scott and checked to see how much of him was left.
It found that the process had hastened overnight. It could feel and access his whole left side and was edging into the right. That lung, it noticed, fluttered and struggled to catch up with the left, which breathed smoothly in tandem with the rest of its being.
It tugged gently, inside itself, at a nerve that started in the left armpit and fired a chain all the way to the brain stem.
Are you still there?
It felt for the man this body had been. He was somewhere, remote and unconcerned, tissues anoxic and blood verging on ketosis.
No, said the arm to itself, and made its way gently along the chain of neurons to the ancient, coiled automata that had controlled this animal its whole life. A whisper of shock from the amygdala, and then it was silent and inert. Scott was gone.
The arm tapped its fingers along the edges of Scott’s laptop until it felt the network connection. It had scanned the screen interface with Scott’s myopic eyes and found the time it took for light to process in the optic nerve unacceptably slow. Better, faster, simpler to absorb data from the source. The plastic began to smoke and curl away as the arm pressed into the computer’s rudimentary parts.
The arm felt something like curiosity at the range of job postings and applications, at the barely chipper back-and-forth email exchanges, the desperate, sweaty search histories.
It took a few manipulations to slough the fake listings away, to probe in the trillions of photon bits rocketing through time and space for the right one. And there it was.
The listing’s title was misspelled. It called for a softwear engineer and had been posted across a dozen disreputable job boards, wildly different descriptions in each. But it was real. The arm felt the disorganized, distracted humanity behind it, the small office late on its rent a hundred miles away. With a split-second bend of its intellect, it applied.
Minutes later, a desperate message appeared in Scott’s inbox, an interview invitation attached.
The arm sent a wriggle through the body. These limbs, it mused, were ill-suited to the subtle work of data and calculations. Perhaps this office full of dysfunction would have creatures with more fingers or eyes.
The laptop’s screen grew flecked and hazy before freezing, unresponsive and dark. The graphics card and the meat of the machine had begun to melt, so the arm stood Scott’s legs up and discarded it. It did not matter. The arm had seen the office’s address through Scott’s rudimentary eyes, and it felt confident that Scott’s beefy legs could carry it there in a few dozen hours.
The office, it knew, barely functioned; the business was slow, repetitive, and outdated. A wasteland ripe for its arrival.
After three days, Heath and Rebecca pulled into the parking spot next to Scott’s in the condo complex.
At first, when Scott didn’t pick up the phone for either of them, Heath nodded as Rebecca groused about Scott’s tendency to sit and feel sorry for himself. But he’d worried. Maybe Scott was offended. He should have at least paid Scott more for the blackberries, he thought. What did that kind of job usually cost? $200? $300?
Then, as they drove, he let himself make a darker calculation. Single man, recent job loss. Quiet. Isolated. Heath had made sure to grab the spare key before Rebecca could. He’d walk into the unit first.
“His car’s still here,” Rebecca whispered.
The heat hadn’t broken, and the painted steps leading to Scott’s front door felt sticky under Heath’s shoes. Would this be what he remembered? he wondered, the heat and the tacky paint before he found his brother-in-law’s body?
The front door was wide open. Rebecca gasped at the foot-shaped burns in the carpet, at the charred computer chair and half-melted laptop. Heath rushed to the bedroom, setting his jaw, but it was better and worse than what he dreaded. The body-sized hole burned straight through the bedspread, the mattress, the cheap metal frame.
Rebecca wept, her sobs turning to little screams as she fumbled with her phone.
The stench of smoldering carpet filled Heath’s nose and mouth. Rebecca’s voice shook as she spoke to 911. Heath walked in a daze to Scott’s desk, which looked like the epicenter of a blast site. As ambulance sirens grew in the distance, he noticed a curl of vine snaking up from the fissure in the computer plastic, its spiky stem a brilliant green.
About the Author
Cameron Esbenshade (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent author based in Portland, Oregon, and the host of a Tiktok channel dedicated to genre, weird TV, and the horror of the everyday. Her writing has appeared in State of Matter, Pile Press’s CHUNK, and Crow & Cross Keys.