and plastic wrap as kindling, which turned the fires in the fireplace a blue-green hue they liked especially to make s’mores over. The mother used hot glue to string together small wreaths from the trash that accrued naturally in their home. She also tried cooking the pieces of paper they used to throw away. For herself she shredded newspaper and stirred it into carrot stews. For the father she deep-fried old Post-it notes and spread boursin cheese over them to hide their messages. For the son she made a crude chewing gum by churning tampon boxes and corn syrup, but he never chewed it, preferring instead to saturate his graded homework assignments in simple syrup and butter and crumple the sheets into balls that he would freeze and later eat for a snack on hot afternoons.
The father finally put this diet to a stop when he found a Christmas card stuck inside a leftover flan. He called a family meeting that night.
“I’m putting this diet to a stop,” he said.
“It’s not our choice,” the son said.
He’s right, the mother wrote. Trash has to go somewhere.
“I don’t care. We’ll do what we have to do, but there will be no more eating of trash in this home. This is lower than dogs,” the father said, holding up the Christmas card on his fork.
The family looked helplessly at one another; there was too much trash, they knew, and not enough space for it in their home, but they couldn’t keep up with the rising price of the city garbage stickers. Staring down at his feet, the son confessed a habit he’d picked up from his friends at school.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when I can’t finish my lunch, I flush it down the toilet.”
He showed his parents how he would empty his paper bag into the toilet, and how easily its contents were taken away from him. The mother cried in silence.
“I don’t know where it goes to,” the son said, “but it’s free.”
“You’ve saved us a lot of grief,” the father said.
I’m proud of you, even if you don’t like my sandwiches, the mother wrote, wiping at her tears.
The family began trash flushing the next day. They were the first in the city to try it in such a large scale. They gathered uneaten food and grocery bags and the bag from inside the vacuum cleaner when it got full, and they piled everything up to the rim of the toilet. The son pressed the flusher and watched the trash spin around in a circle, and then slowly lower.
Look at it spin, the mother wrote.
Trash flushing soon became a habit for the family; when they no longer needed something, it went into the toilet, and immediately it was taken away. They felt this process bore an uncanny resemblance to the way their bodies functioned, which made it vaguely Native American—feeling to them.
To keep the water bill from going up, the family used public restrooms when they could, and they agreed to flush their trash only twice a day, once at 4:00 and once at 10:00. This way they had something to anticipate all afternoon and all evening, and they could share in the flushing together, which only seemed appropriate to them.
The 4:00 flush was the louder of the two. This was partly because the afternoons tended to collect the louder sort of trash, such as cardboard slats and empty cans of hairspray, and partly it was because the family had been thinking of nothing but this 4:00 flush all day, and so they cheered rather loudly for it. They cheered when trash piled up too high and they had to steer it with brooms to keep from tipping over. They cheered when the mother got sick from the combination of trash smell and lavender Glade plug-in and she leaned forward and vomited into the toilet bowl; she cheered this as well, clapping along with her son and husband. And they cheered when the toilet shook and made a wet belching sound after sucking down the afternoon’s trash, and a small gray animal popped out from the toilet and landed on the bathmat.
The animal shivered as the family cheered it on. It shook
The father finally put this diet to a stop when he found a Christmas card stuck inside a leftover flan. He called a family meeting that night.
“I’m putting this diet to a stop,” he said.
“It’s not our choice,” the son said.
He’s right, the mother wrote. Trash has to go somewhere.
“I don’t care. We’ll do what we have to do, but there will be no more eating of trash in this home. This is lower than dogs,” the father said, holding up the Christmas card on his fork.
The family looked helplessly at one another; there was too much trash, they knew, and not enough space for it in their home, but they couldn’t keep up with the rising price of the city garbage stickers. Staring down at his feet, the son confessed a habit he’d picked up from his friends at school.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when I can’t finish my lunch, I flush it down the toilet.”
He showed his parents how he would empty his paper bag into the toilet, and how easily its contents were taken away from him. The mother cried in silence.
“I don’t know where it goes to,” the son said, “but it’s free.”
“You’ve saved us a lot of grief,” the father said.
I’m proud of you, even if you don’t like my sandwiches, the mother wrote, wiping at her tears.
The family began trash flushing the next day. They were the first in the city to try it in such a large scale. They gathered uneaten food and grocery bags and the bag from inside the vacuum cleaner when it got full, and they piled everything up to the rim of the toilet. The son pressed the flusher and watched the trash spin around in a circle, and then slowly lower.
Look at it spin, the mother wrote.
Trash flushing soon became a habit for the family; when they no longer needed something, it went into the toilet, and immediately it was taken away. They felt this process bore an uncanny resemblance to the way their bodies functioned, which made it vaguely Native American—feeling to them.
To keep the water bill from going up, the family used public restrooms when they could, and they agreed to flush their trash only twice a day, once at 4:00 and once at 10:00. This way they had something to anticipate all afternoon and all evening, and they could share in the flushing together, which only seemed appropriate to them.
The 4:00 flush was the louder of the two. This was partly because the afternoons tended to collect the louder sort of trash, such as cardboard slats and empty cans of hairspray, and partly it was because the family had been thinking of nothing but this 4:00 flush all day, and so they cheered rather loudly for it. They cheered when trash piled up too high and they had to steer it with brooms to keep from tipping over. They cheered when the mother got sick from the combination of trash smell and lavender Glade plug-in and she leaned forward and vomited into the toilet bowl; she cheered this as well, clapping along with her son and husband. And they cheered when the toilet shook and made a wet belching sound after sucking down the afternoon’s trash, and a small gray animal popped out from the toilet and landed on the bathmat.
The animal shivered as the family cheered it on. It shook
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