《Awful garbage》


 Prologue

    They knew the earth was fucked, everywhere would be uninhabitable in less than one thousand years, due to landfills and air pollution, and living would be strained in about two hundred. Not that they cared, the revelers just accepted this as fact and kept having a good time. Currently, the three men were in connecticut celebrating their one year anniversary of celebrating in a vacant lot littered with trash, there was also a barrel, bonfire blazing inside with three folding chairs surrounding it. The sky is gray and cloudy. One man, a tall blonde guy with an unbuttoned flannel shirt and jogger sweats, stood up and raised his bottle to say, ¡°Here¡¯s to us, and our parties!¡± the other two yelled ¡°Yeah,¡± ¡°Woo!¡± and emptied their beers.


    All their alcohol gone, the plastered partygoers sat around, occasionally sniffing or clearing their throats. Until something shifted in one of the piles of garbage and they turned, quickly looking at the source of the noise. ¡°Damn raccoons.¡± A short, thin man mumbled, his bald head shining in the firelight. Another man whined, ¡°Let¡¯s kill it, raccoons spook me!¡± this man is also tall, if a bit chubby and pathetic. ¡°Kill it yourself, Jib,¡± The other tall man said, ¡°It doesn¡¯t bother me.¡± the chubby man, now Jib, pouts and gets ready to complain again, ¡°But-¡± ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll kill it!¡± the short man interrupted. ¡°Thank you, Dane.¡± Said Jib, in his seemingly default whiney voice, but Dane was already on his way to the rustling refuse. When he got there, he looked all around the pile, digging through and kicking things, and found nothing, but the rustling was still rustling on, so Dane shouted, ¡°Hey Wade, you got the handgun?¡± ¡°Yea, come and get it.¡± the rustling stopped.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    After that, the men left, presumably for more booze and another reason to drink. If they had stayed, they would have noticed the trash rustling again, and if they were to look, they would have seen a small, golf ball sized lump of old, gray gum, rocking back and forth to some unknown tune.

 Chapter One

    Life. A strange sort of energy, it would seem, for just about anything can absorb it, with the right conditions. Say, a wad of gum? Imagine, a thirteen year old boy pools money with his friends and buys four packs of big league chew, he rips open the packages and stuffs all the gum in his mouth, slobbering and choking and getting the best jaw workout on the market. then it loses its flavor, a slightly bitter mass of rubbery pink chew, thrown on the ground for someone to step on. Now, when that much of one thing is combined with  equal or greater parts of biological material, like saliva, it gets a little weird.


    Back in the vacant lot, it is raining, and it is raining hard, like the earth wanted to do the ice bucket challenge, but with a planet- sized fire hose. Some who are crazy or poor enough to be out in the rain are occasionally knocked down by it, and an alley cat didn''t get back up. This is great if you are made of stale gum and need a way to get around. As the bullet- sized drops of water hydrated this gray glob, it realized it didn''t know how to stretch, but it could wiggle, and wiggle it did, it wiggled, wriggled and writhed its way to the middle of the lot, not that it could see that. In actuality, it could only sense the ground around it, and vibrations in the ground. But that would soon be fixed, it felt. But as it stands right now, the rain was flattening it, and that was a problem, it could be separated if it was thinner, so it instinctively curled up, becoming a ball again, this time with rainwater trapped inside, experimentally, it made a hole on one side and squeezed, spraying the small amount of water back out.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Now armed with the knowledge of how to move and mold itself, it set off in a random direction, feeling its way forward with a probing protrusion and bumping into every conceivable thing to bump into on the way. Eventually it found itself in a troubling position, after hours of crawling. It was drying out again, and it needed moisture quickly. Unfortunately, It had gotten rid of the only water it had before the storm ended, so the sticky savant rolled for all it was worth, trying to find a puddle to revitalize it. It rolled forward, faster and faster, until it fell. It fell quite far, it thought, for it had never fallen before, but it had only really fell about 3 feet, into a sewer. This was fine, because the gum didn¡¯t know what a sewer was, and it couldn¡¯t smell anyhow. But there was water! The mangy mucilage was delighted to be supple and stretchy again, but it still didn¡¯t know where it was going, so it tried to rectify that situation. One thing it knew instinctively was that seeing was good, and it wanted seeing, so it bobbed about, looking for sight. It soon realized this was a pointless endeavor, and almost gave up, when a round bit of plastic stuck fast to it! To it¡¯s surprise, the plastic let it see slightly, but it was dark in here, so it bobbed towards the stony edge. Once it was out, it tried to move while keeping sewer water inside itself, and found that it was slow, frustrating, and pointless, because it would only keep his insides wet. But that was fine, because it could see now! And it felt that mad dash for water catching up to it, to it covered up it¡¯s ersatz eye and rested.

 Chapter Two

    But this is not how this particular gum came to be. This gum was a small miracle. Or accident. Whichever way it existed, it was disposed of in the most violent way possible, which failed to kill it. Now the gum knew none of this, naturally, it only just was ¡°born¡± months ago. But it learns.


    As the gum woke up, it noticed a pinching sensation in its side, it quickly turned and saw a weird, warm sort of oval, covered incredibly thin strands of some on known material, sprouting four jointed limbs and a long, slightly thicker, pink tentacle of sorts, and a ghastly, gaping hole in the front, lined with hard, sharp white things that poked into the gum¡¯s¡­ gum. In other words, a rat had got it. The gum immediately thrashed and wiggled, scaring the rat, because it knew this stuff wasn¡¯t supposed to move. Stiff from being out of the water, the gum rolled into the sewer water again, bringing its stretchiness back. It then decided to find where it had come in from, which was difficult considering it hadn¡¯t been able to see when it rolled in, but eventually it found light, and a hole, very high up. In comparison to the gum, anyhow. It stretched, but fell because it got too thin, it attempted to climb, but the walls were mucky and slick. Finally, it decided to use the tall, runged object next to the hole. It stretched up to the first horizontal bar and wrapped around it, then it stretched up to the next one with a sucking sound as it detached from the last one, this went on for about three more rungs when it realized something: it didn¡¯t like being up this high, it looked scary when it looked down, and it was a small platform up here. Slowly, it kept going up, but this time it was scared to let go of the rung below, so when it pulled, it broke in two.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    It immediately thought that this was bad, and tried to get back to its other half, but what surprised it is its other half came to it. This frightened the young blob and so the other half immediately stopped. This gave the main half an idea, a surprisingly good one for having half a brain. It thought of water, and being not dead. These things made it happy, and so the seperated segment oozed upward, toward the main half. Once the pink polymer was back together, it finally made its way out, miraculously over it¡¯s fear of heights. Now outside, the gum saw it was very light out here, and it was loud, if the vibrating ground was anything to go by. It could see that there were strange looking animals up here, they were monumental in size, their colors varied greatly, and there was a clear hierarchy here. The ones sitting down were obviously the most important, they sat around, got food, and weren¡¯t forced to wash, it seemed, where the ones in a hurry were less important, doing the bidding of the ones on the ground or blowing into metal. Of course, this is from the perspective of a piece of sentient gum, who doesn¡¯t know what a home is. It was in a subway, looking at the commuters and the homeless, and oblivious to the fact it was being watched.

 Not a chapter, Abandoned

    This story was going to be much much longer, but it was too much of an undertaking and I''m going to be abandoning it. I think I''ll do short stories instead for a while as writing a webserial is too much for me. Thank you to everyone who read the measly three chapters, and thanks to anyone who thought this story would take off. I will now write some random crap to fill the 500 character minimum, antidisestablishmentarianism, pineapple upside down cake on a brioche bun wrapped in bacon. Read everybody loves large chests by Exterminatus, and the wandering inn by Pirateaba, and don''t forget to have the most wonderful day of your life because it might end tomorrow. Buh byeThe author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.