The sewer is a wonderful place.
Long ago a king, jolly and addled by intoxicants, made a friendly bet with the city Gnomes. For 100 gold coins it was wagered that they could not create a sewer so perfect that even the gods would tell fables of its beauty.
Not understanding the concept of levity and seeing this bet to be challenging the very foundation of the Gnomish engineering they ventured forward, beginning major construction later that day.
Unbeknownst to the Gnomes: King George later would claim that a bit of a pipe painted grey and chucked somewhere near the slums probably would have been enough to win the bet, but because all the workers looked so busy he didn’t want to interrupt them.
Ten generations now have passed and the Gnomes are still working on their masterpiece, ever maintaining old sections, expanding new canal systems and creating quite a reasonable property market for first time hovel buyers.
It’s believed that sections of the the current sewer are so efficient that in some cases its water is more potable, and far less pulpy, than the town’s own drinking water. For this reason travellers are warned against drinking any ‘filtered bore’ water when dining in the city of Carrick-Joyce.
The painstakingly crafted brickwork of the sewer softly reflects natural light across the water, its precise angles illuminating the tunnels, doing away with the need for lamp light in daylight hours and giving the entire sewer a peaceful tranquility.
Murals depicting the workers, ever resolute against the struggles of their labour, have been meticulously hand carved into the brickwork. These hidden carvings could easily be some of the greatest artistic treasures within the known world, were they not installed inside sewer…So as it stands the frankly beautiful murals silently watch over the ever flowing canals and aqueducts underneath Carrick Joyce, slowly growing patches of tastefully decorative moss.
And yet, it’s not a perfect system.
Sewers are not meant for rubbish, but this term ‘not meant for’ is already a resignation to defeat; and so, accounts have been made for the ‘Non-organic’ refuse dumped into the system.
Older sections of the Sewer network, not designed for the rubbish, are clogged with a deluge of intermixed waste and recycling, and within these ever fermenting piles a strange phenomena has begun to occur. Patches of garbage take shape and now lurch through the sewers, blindly consuming all before them. Some have come to the belief that these creatures manifest due to a smell becoming so fowl that the garbage itself gains ambulatory sentience in trying to escape its own odour.
These shambling mounds of trash have become known as a Shabbles, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the head tax collector Shabbles deGrooch -A joyless man who enjoys this eponym much in the way that most tax collectors will enjoy anything*.
The Gnomes see these dumps as a blight on their sewer, and have formed an armed militia to disperse the Shabbles along with the many other evils that have taken residence in the sewer. They are named the Garbage Collectors, or as Garbos for those too busy to engage with entire words.
Fredric Cloth, a young gnome of 120, was employed as a Garbage Collector.
While short and practical for filling in forms, the surname Cloth was not particularly Gnome-ish’, as his friends Andrea Glitterbucket and Clemithy Pettlepatch-willow would frequently remind him. Andrea and Clem both enjoyed coming up with a variety of nicknames for Fredric and had recently started calling him ‘Tea bags’, due to their joking that water always seemed to turn brown whenever he went for a swim – It should be clear that Fredric Cloth did not have particularly nice friends.
And so at his heart Fredric was a coward, his whole blood-line was. Long survived by an ever readiness to run away, the Cloth family crest was that of a frightened sheep bearing the motto ‘Ah! What was that!?.’
It was in this moment that Fredric was airborne: self propelled in sprint. The shabble that chased him through sewer block 104b had failed to tire over the last 10 minutes and, with the sharpness of a true coward, Fredric knew that great actions needed to be prepared for and then undertaken. Spinning around, with unexpected determination, he stared into the maw of the approaching Shabble and appeared to stand nearly as resolute as the very stone beside him.
Onlookers watching this daring last stand would have been rather surprised to then see a fully armed Garbage collector drop his axe and dive headfirst into the canal, leaving the, admittedly rather small, pile of trash to slam into a wall and crumble apart.
Thrashing in his struggle to keep afloat while gently bobbing away downstream, Fredric yelled back to his quarry, ‘Take that you fiend!’ continuing after sputtering a mouthful of what he hoped to be brackish water, ‘Remember – cough – the name is Cloth!’
Being that the Shables didn’t have ears, nor was it capable of a memory, it happily resumed life as a pile of garbage while the family of rats, who watched the whole event unfold, began celebrating their sudden windfall of food.
For some, the sewer is a wonderful place.
*not at all
Jacob McCray
-2019
Sunday Short Stories 