The Work of Drowning
by Justine Gaw
[Please be aware that this story presents the graphic consequences of a desperate
lifestyle that is not speculative. It is a reality faced by countless “throwaway”
children, forced to live in or near landfills created by a throwaway society, more
focused on consumption and convenience than the circumstances of others’ lives.]
Her feet were burned when they found her. Thirteen years old, upper arm wrenched out of
its socket, skin taut around the smooth ball of exposed bone. Charred remains of an older boy
by her side, broken amongst the burning garbage. It was different fires that burned them. She
had been dragging his cold coal remains for some time when she tripped over the shallow pit
of smoking copper and went flying, dislocating her arm with a neat pop. They found her
grasping at her shoulder, blistered soles dangling too close to the smoldering trash. She would
not let them take him away.
______
One scalding breath of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Then another, then millions more to
come. To breathe is to suffocate, to swim is to drown. Her first steps are taken in calf-deep
muck, soot mixed in rainwater and refuse from a thousand other worlds, bubbles of
methane gas snapping as she wobbles for balance. He is there at once, hands scooping her
up, child of nine staggering under the weight of his sister. He likes her name, hears it curve
around her face, softening the blunt hair and pointed chin. He takes her hand and traces the
letters out on the fine dusting of ash draped over trash-ridden concrete.
Mia watches his retreating back through the sun-thrashed haze. He trundles his makeshift
pushcart in search of plastic bottles and bits of copper to sell. On cool days she trails after
him, and if she’s lucky, he’ll show her how to break burnt-out lightbulbs against her knee
and pick out the copper coils inside. The glass scrapes at her fingers when she reaches in.
She cries out, red beads rising in rings.
“Stupid, stupid,” Yeshua remarks fondly, brushing off the shards. “Put it in your mouth.”
She sucks on her index finger, eyes still burning even as he hands her another lightbulb. A
shard of glass patterned with smoke lodges into the base of her thumb. She swallows her
whine but he hears her still, dabbing at the puncture with the hem of his shirt.
He takes her to the little makeshift chapel to witness his baptism. Her toes are scrubbed
for once, a lifetime of burned garbage scraped off on a cinder block and dipped in the sepia
river. She watched him scowl at the sticking parts, where she stepped into a pack of
corroding batteries. There is none of that frustration here, his serene face in mimicry of
Saint Peter’s. She swings her legs, delighting in the feel of her new purple dress with the
faded white flowers against her thighs, fingers tangled in the thin border of ruffles. She
smiles at the Father with the condemning innocence of a child, glassy pools of cool water
staring in what he sees as reproach. Yeshua’s hair is matted to his forehead during their
walk back to the row of hovels and a drop of holy water glistens on the tip of his nose as he
grips her hand.
The garbage trucks rumble periodically through the dumpsite, trailing a swarm of
children greedy for fresh garbage. Yeshua holds an iron hook in one hand and a wicker
basket in the other. Her fingers find his elbow, grasping in quiet desperation as the next
mud-streaked truck announces its presence. He raises his voice to be heard over the din of
the ruthless machines, pointing to the group of older boys standing on the highest trash
mound.
“You like jumping right?”
She snaps her head towards him in bewilderment. “Jumping? What’s jumping got to do
with this?”
They watch as one boy takes a flying leap off the trash mound, landing in a crouch on the
garbage truck. He begins to pick at the garbage, flashing plastic and glass. One misstep and
he could have gone sliding into the path of the truck, another martyr of the garbage dump.
She bats at his arm, voice rising with panic.
“I can’t do that, I’ll fall and break my neck!”
“That’s where the good copper is.”
There’s laughter in his eyes as he takes her flailing hand and pulls her up the mountain.
The first time, she slips on the skidding pile of trash and tumbles dangerously close to the
truck. The heat of the exhaust scorches her face. He snatches the collar of her shirt and
drags her inches away from the wheels. She is breathless with laughter as he grabs her arm
and pulls her further from the road. He drops to his knees and rolls onto his back beside
her, chest heaving.
“I told you I’d break my neck!”
“I don’t see a broken neck.”
She swats at him. “You think this is funny? You just want to see me squished into a
pancake.”
“You wouldn’t taste good as a pancake.” He sticks out his tongue. “Too many sharp bits.”
She jerks away, cackling, as he sits up to pinch at her arm.
The second time, she makes it onto the truck, feet splayed over crushed soda cans and
empty plastic bottles. Yeshua is quick with the hook, sweeping his critical eye over the
broken glass and used electronics. She’s over-eager to dismount the beast and lands in a
tumble, heels tangling like a lamb stumbling over its unsteady limbs.
“You’ll have to learn how to do this. What happens when I’m not here?”
She scoffs, “You talk like you’re going to go off and get married, leave me alone.”
“And what if I do?” He screws his nose up through the exhaust, coughing into the collar of
his shirt.
“You won’t.”
On one of these trips, a rusty nail pierces clean through her foot, flakes of hematite
clinging to the torn skin. Crucified sole drooping from limp ankle, her fingers smear soot
onto his neck as he works out the nail with ashy fingers, gentler than any caress of dreams.
Did the weight of damning wood ever morph into the body of a little sister, knees
permanently painted in clouds of ink? He does his best to wash the wound, breath hitching
as he smears the blood around. Frustrated, he sets her down and lifts her foot, brows
drawn in the glower of a child.
“I’m sorry.” Her head is tilted to the side, voice muffled as she avoids his eyes.
“Why?”
“I can’t jump anymore.”
He sits back on his heels, squinting at her through the chemical yellow glare of the sun.
“That’s okay. You were never really good at jumping anyway.”
_____
The rain comes in torrents, backing up gutters and sliding heaps of trash in avalanches.
Far away she can see neon yellow rescue boats coming as the floodwaters rise to her chest;
people are evacuating but squatter children have always been good swimmers. Mia sits on
their corrugated tin roof, years of dirt dripping from her hair. She watches the younger
children dive into the water, splashing and shrieking with delight. Usually Yeshua is
swimming with them, but this time he hangs back, forehead oddly pale. There is something
to say about the illness of being a child, the only illness that baptism by fire heals so
readily.
A chilly violence hums in the rain, a seething anger in the relentless weeping sky that she
cannot place. The boys are no longer swimming, the girls no longer washing their hair.
They huddle on their roofs like Mia and Yeshua, scared eyes in sallow faces. She can feel
Yeshua shaking even when she presses her hand flat against the knobs of his vertebrae,
willing him to stop.
The soaking winds lash at their skin, every drop of rain punching through flesh like
bullets through silk. The children cluster together, stripping their drenched clothes off.
Better to be cold than cold and soaked. A little girl, maybe six, begins to cry. She’s tired, sick
of the rain bouncing off her skull, and her head hurts. Yeshua leads the children into the
chapel, the only real building near the dumpsite. The nuns usher them in, pushing aside
pews and dragging back the altar. He tucks Mia under his elbow so she doesn’t get lost in
the flock.
The same girl is coughing, skeletal body wracked with spasms, breathing torn by the hiss
of phlegm. Blackened lungs crumbling to ash when submerged in so much water. Mia can
hear her at night, all the children lying in quiet rows on the church floor, a cricket rasp. She
rests her head against Yeshua’s shoulder, radiating heat.
They are loath to throw the girl’s body into the garbage piles when she dies. Her relatives
cling to her cheap sawdust coffin until they see maggots squirming beneath her skin,
spilling from beneath slightly parted lips. It gives the impression of her face twitching,
holding back laughter. As though her death is a joke none of them understand.
The pouring rain and the close quarters bring outbreaks of disease, thieves in the night.
Mia lies tangled in the throng of sick children, hand pressed to Yeshua’s fever-hot neck,
listening to the gasping hush of his red throat, his rattling lungs. A louse skitters along his
hairline, stumbling on a bent leg, waving broken antennae. She reaches out and pinches the
keratin-yellow body, watching her brother’s blood seep into the ridges of her fingers.
They tell stories, the nuns, stories that blend the past with paradise. They point to the
nebulous gray waters lapping at her toes and whisper of waves glittering, diamonds
trickling down their bare shoulders, pastel starfish with curling feelers, long fingers of
seaweed waving their greetings from below. They talk of the sun burning into the water,
flames licking the rapidly cooling swells, blue-tinged in vibrant inferno. They tell these
stories to the children about to die.
“I hate when they talk about fire.”
Mia leans closer to her brother until his hot blood bubbles in her ears. “What?”
Yeshua struggles to focus his shaking, dilated pupils on her. “Don’t let them burn my
body.”
“You won’t die.”
“I’ve had enough of fire. Don’t make me one of those burned things you sift through for
copper.”
“But you talk so much of fire. God’s fire.”
“Refiner’s fire.” His teeth are black. “I’m sick of it. The Father says that heaven is ablaze
with light. Hell is brimstone and ash. It all ends in fire. Why does it end in fire?”
“But you told me––”
He cuts her off. “I’m tired of being cleansed and I’m tired of being freed. What if flesh is
flesh and spirit is spirit and they can’t burn it away? What if there’s no copper to harvest
and sell for a bite of fruit? What if there’s not even rotten fruit at the end of this?”
He shakes her hand away, frantic and feeble. “My sins are paid for but what of the sins
committed against me?”
Mia has no answer.
_____
They took him anyway.
They cut off her singed clothes, dress her burns and scrapes with aloe vera. A clean blue
uniform is tugged over her head, blistered feet padded in bleach-stiff socks and encased in
shiny black shoes. She traces her fingers over scabbed lips, unmoored on the tiled floors so
bright they sting her eyes. Fingers, so nimble when scraping copper out of cathode ray tubes,
now fumble with a bright yellow pencil.
Yeshua lies in the free burial pits, the garbage dump for garbage dump children. She rests
her chin on her knees. No stone to roll away, no burial linens perfumed with tears. Little blue
angel guarding the tomb of her fallen god who will never, never awaken.