Junk

by Peter DeMarco

Marco Furioso

The smell of waste filled the hospital room because his mother’s kidneys had failed after a year-long battle with leukemia and chemotherapy, common vocabulary at the dinner table, those dreaded words with the harsh ‘k’ sound signifying something deadly, but now at barbeques there were condolences for his father and more disturbing words, like arsenic and carcinogens, as neighbors waved cigarettes and talked of pesticides farmers once used in the potato fields, before the land was turned into suburbia, with its streets named after trees and flowers, and long after the Indians no longer existed in a place that would become a town named for the Indian translation for fertile, or pleasant land, but that’s what it is, the neighbors would say, those damn pesticides, all this cancer, and they’d find more reasons to curse, like possible radiation from high tension wires strung between the homes and housed on a pole in the woods, unaware of the irony that it provided the comforts of post WWII life, so to escape those dreaded words and cancer theories he’d retreat to the woods and play imaginary war games and read comics in his treehouse, and sometimes he’d see a discarded soda can or McDonald’s Styrofoam package and think about the commercial with the crying Indian standing on the side of the highway, garbage thrown from a passing car sitting at his feet, and years later he’d realize the Indians didn’t have garbage, every possession was precious for their survival, while the place named for fertile or pleasant land created town dumps with mountains of stuff once manufactured for extreme consumerism, a disease in itself, but now just considered junk, heaps of metal and plastic and rubber that could conceivably outlast them for hundreds and hundreds of years, made up of noxious cancer causing chemicals, rusting and decomposing into the land’s natural core, but the thing he never forgot, that even scared him for a moment, thinking it was real, like in a horror movie, was the hideous grin from the giant white teeth half buried in the woods, a plastic chattering teeth toy that had fallen out of a birthday party goody bag or was won at the church carnival, and its wide white smile appeared to mock him, like it was in on its own private joke, and sometimes he’d laugh at the idea it was still there, grinning at nobody, shedding its toxic plastic shell into the once pleasant land.

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Peter DeMarco published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing, and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the amateur stand-up comedy circuit in New York City. Other writing credits include pieces in Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, Prime Number Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Unleash Lit, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Palisades Review, Pithead Chapel. Read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com