HEAPside Stories
§1.977
One fine morning, a rusted out automobile leapt on to the raft and ate that old bug-eyed alley cat. They stood stunned for a moment, staring at the spot where the cat had been sitting, not comprehending what had just happened. The hulking metal beast, resting on its blocks a second, shook its soft-top in the acrid breeze, and threw itself back whence it breached. They rubbed their dirty eyes, and spitting on the soiled spot exclaimed, “Look! Another tabby tip-lipping, smiling, comes this way!!!”
§1.209
Whoop-whoop no more! Snot-pocket rags done! Gone are the days of illness, but only if you accept née 2-aught-20 model Devine-Deviral into your life. The pandaemonium of pathogens in your system making you sick right now will be trained to fight each other. But there’s more! They can provide the gladiatorial jouissance needed to do nothing more. Nothing. These wargames of atrition will occupy you for hours. Will ebola finally eat covid for good? Can trusty old polio make that comeback? Who knows?
§1.704
Vast pools of ground silicon in their glassy surfaces reflect the erie moonlights hued with tawny and morose vapours. Nights are long, and not only does one have to guard for Inklings, one must beware of the Deathlings as well. The Deathlings come in their faunae forms looking to feast, where even the antelopes dine along side the lions on the wasted flesh of the dead. In their hunger, they lash out at anyone in their grasp, this means they are easily distracted by the well placed toss of flesh.
§1.667
Twisted rails around tankers knotted together nest-like, and a mushroom plume fills the ugly sky with strange lightning flashes and odd illuminations. Vinyl chloride burns uncontrollably spewing, and belching, noxious smokes into an afternoon’s open wasteland. Summer smiles from behind their active ready-made charcoal and glass tent where they spend hours playing, and making mudcakes with their filthy lucre, “ring around the rosie, a pocket full of poesies, hush-a hush-a, we all fall down dead!”
§1.602
This psychogenic relation to all the trash was unmistakable, not only did the surface express the desires of the subject, the depths could be probed to prove its complicity in them too. An enveloped dive, processing through the coagulated coalescence, feeding like a worm, the contraption swallowed deeper and deeper into the HEAP. Through portholes spied the walleye tabby at rusty cans chasing themselves in the mirk, swimming amongst tetra-paks turned inside out and flashing their metalic liners.
§1.392
Commiserating, fragments of civilisation spoke to each other in passing remarks that only the faunae understood. In translations, the shit-hawks screech, “Fine! Fine! All that’s fine is mine! Fine! Fine!” From the captain’s stool perched the greedy cat mewing, “You’re fucking right it’s all mine!” All the while, Summer was fitting magazine cutouts with servos and baubbles, fresh text atomized and fed into reassemblages of forgotten members, muttering, “Sure, it’s all your’s, everything else is.”
§1.416
Excess was that bountiful excratory product of non-description that made up the bulk of the HEAP. Any recognisable object was couched in this indeterminate stuff, practically dripping with it. This stuff even managed to seep between any two turds on an hot afternoon. Attempts to both qualify and quantify the excess proved unfruitfully delectable, especially when extruded by separators like play-dough through a childrens toy. Delectable indeed, the mystery filling between everything, tastes good.
§1.975
Slurp right up folx! Don’t miss out! Sum deGuy has thought of everything so you don’t have to too! With nothing but the HEAP for guidance, they built armies of porno-maché automatons to wish fulfil your wishes. That’s right, for any credits down you can have your haircut and asswipe in one convenient and patented action. And there’s more! If you act now we’ll throw in the self-propelling neé 177nu model for free! No longer do you have to be that throbbing bit of flesh pushing the machine around.
§1.161
Torchlight through stained glass pictographs flickered with animated delight, and dancing among the photon floods were cicadas, moths, and beetles. The appiritions, mingling a new precision without a punchline, enticed the shadowed from behind Summer’s intentional perspective that lay blind side to the audience of anticipatory revels. Spinning and sinning, in sickness and in barf, the images pressed on in blind heat, and presenting, they play a tortured game of musical chairs in moody shiftwork.
§1.654
Boredom with the HEAP was the unachievable direction Summer was headed, the regression leading the progression with a gap quickly filled in the wake. Paisley shaped shards of plastic disintergrated into julia set curls of dust rising on updrafts in the heat. Slippery mirages like hot grease manifest at the rap of a thought or finger, and begin the process of getting a new article attached to the articulation. It’s a reflexive atavism; to have boredom, one must be boring, the animata is unboring.
§1.678
WEATHER REPORT: for the day 100eighty3rd Day (year 1 A.C.) There has been a new development, but I can’t mention it for now. The day and night cycle has become unpredictable, and the length of light’s hour fluxuates without rhythm: 6hrs, 13hrs, 4.5hrs, day by day there is nonsense. During the coincidentally erratic nights, the fixed stars glare with ugly lights going out one by one. The starmap’s deliquescence highlighted the smoggy manifestations haunting sky with rancourous caring stoop falls.
§1.849
The parasitic vines, growing and connecting everywhere to everything, were often in many stages of catching, dissolving, and sucking, any faunae that wandered or stumbled to close to the excellent business end. This end, that spelled death for many, was the opportunity the scavenger community needed, including Summer. It’s better to feed off the excess death of other’s, than it is to do anything else, really. It was the colour of the flowers growing on the vines that identified nutritional value.
§1.255
Absolutely borderless, the wasteland’s repository was the ground of all possible knowledge, the repressed unconcious in its abjection of itself as a project for the self to find itself. The refuse HEAP of a mechanised and electrified society’s material existence in all its post-consumption artefacts that belie their intentional nature to disregard, or discard, unintentional results. The unintentional waste, even if fed back into intentional waste prevention schemes, is always present at the end.
§1.007
Torrential floods of the tooth-faerie’s milk teeth, and lost change, drawn on by the moon’s pull, poured in over the slanted horizon with a right-hand bias. The teeth were that creamy yellow of antique ivory patina, and scored with runes, and skulls, by the churning process of maximum disintergration. Caught between them were bits of holiday gift tags penned in the every changing scripts of crypto-beast parents in their attempt to coddle nostalgia, and magical thinking. The fillings long yanked.
§1.081
Sometimes starting as silhouette bugs, where the trash meets the sky, they arrive to travel in blown out buses with mechanical millipede legs, hunting as one would in this situation. Game’s afoot, single-player mode engages with the [subject : object] resolution machine, and once overlaps in the ratios are determined, both ante and post, the trash opens and the sky drains into the sinkhole’s snuffled yawn. Giant sheet metal mits grabbed at more and more sky, shovering and gluttering up the rest.
§1.783
The wonderful parades of Faunae burst apon the most opportune time signatures of refuse reappearance in complex, and permutative, patterns of determination. Heavy metals heaving up, and pumping. Hydrocarbons through twisted and impressive sequences can predict the Deathling’s arrival, no matter the atmospheric conditions. When semiconductors intermingled with mucous enveloped in waves of limestone aggregates the Inklings creep, but only in the dark corners of a contraption apparatus continental.
§1.398
I too have found a message! So now we can rest assured that you and I do exist, and thus the plan to find one another promises success. That was fabulous placement, to put the device into an automobile’s glovebox was a stroke of genius, but I do have some reservations as to the content. The complaint and spleen is too hard on my sensibilities, which are easily persuaded to melancholy, for me to engage with derision and mutiny of attitude. So please, lay off the litany of excuses for inabilities.
§1.354
The philosphers were wrong in their appellation of ready-made when they meant already-made, and so they were blind to the readily-made parameters of the true ready-made. It’s at the intersection of ablation’s ready organs, and the mushroom’s dehisced spores. Functional instructions in the latter, and the functional release of instruction when the organ is freed from the donor in the former, where both are the waste products of life and death, there to readily infect the readily available medium.
§1.500
The convenience of all the things being available, at hand, provided some assurances that anything could be called into service at anytime. From a power-suit of duct-taped instruments the preformance would begin with that signature lift of the finger, from there the streams of trashness would flow deconstructing and reconstructing as seen fit by the operator. The ease with which anybody could operate the suit meant that everybody would eventually come to be contained in their own personal suits.
§1.111
Facial interfacing with the HEAP was Summer’s favorite way of communicating with it. As the trash moulds to the topographical features of the face, commands can be given by something as subtle as a brow arched, or a wink, and the phrenologic background personalises the experience subconciously so the projections effortlessly animate the sensible. If the claustrophobia of the arrangement overwhelms, then leaning way back onto the HEAP, they backfloat, and bodysurf while spying blanche sky above.
§1.090
The taming of the shit-hawk went as expected, by the end of the episode they exacted perfect reflections of each other, both weaponising feces in an ever more precise manner, both acquiescing to their baser natures, they tamed each other. The result a cliché, the bird sat on their shoulder pirate-style, appropriately a trail of shit down the back, the bird perched waiting for the leftover wastes and the opportunity to stoop a poop on its host. So inseparable the alley-cat developed an infection.
§1.671
In a clear resealable baggie Summer kept a tiny forest, and supplied it so verily. Original found containing a dead fish floating in putrid water, it now held a climate controlled humidor exhausting vent after vent, breathing to nurture an over-complicated mechanical mimic of a misremembered natural process. The introduction of faunae into the baggie was a huge success, from that point on it was able to reproduce itself with increasingly abstract generation of interrelational commerce lubricant.
§1.989
Oh, how the lucky-surprise weapons, that popped up amongst the churning and re/assembling trash, delighted Summer! The sheer thrill, the thundering bravado, the concussive in a world of easy ennui, becomes a valorizing agent by a levelling laying waste and reduction. The reproduction mechanism laid bare; “Out of the trash I came, and to the trash I shall return. . .yes, yes, to my HEAP I shall level and add it all.” The accumulative instruments of mass destruction named, Big Bunny, Lil’ Lu, etc.
§1.669
That rode the breeze alongside foul miasma, the howls poured in over the crooked lunar horizon on the horizon, the flagrant rise for a night of challenge in the sky. Constellationless, the awkward clouds crowded and pressed in on all sides chasing the wake of a lazy moon who let slip the dreams of war. Strange and bounding shades jockey for position as they rush across the landscape, the cries and howls entertaining call and responsed articulations of a lost experience tied to maintain historicity.
§1.426
One of the most stable shelters was the one following the first few day’s post Coag emergency shrouds. Near the surface of the HEAP, along with the untold reams of shredded pornos, was nearly the same quantity of empty cannabis packaging, wrapping, and/or baggies. So much plastic to waterproof, with no irony, the intermediate and longest stage of development was spent melting the stuff together, with a magnifying glass, into a continuous fabric-like membrane, that was fixed onto anything taught.
§1.036
Old-timey airships with delicate threads of glass holding together a cellophane balloon filled with coloured gasses descended to deliver Summer’s recent twitch of a Rankling, or two. Looney as midnight on a new moon, the Ranklings scurried into positions of bottle-necked effusions, and like an airlock full of hops exploded without destroying themselves, while shooting themselves, along with the sticky trub, towards a preprogrammed target, or targets. That yeasty goodness soon spawned everywhere.
§1.729
Soul sockin’ dreams! Let née 7047 model PamPer process and cater to your comforts! You deserve it! Those effortless shifts on the HEAP will breeze even more once you’ve accepted 7047 into your life! There is no better promise! There is no shorter shortcut! No detour destinations missed! Just set the latch to snatch when sprung and listen for that patented Whirl-a-clicking to know all is well between you, and your 7047 miracle contraption. Drift drift baby, off to sleepyville, inhabitants: one!!!
§1.209
The lack of firewood bothered noone, there were many things more inflammable than wood. The plastic, of course, but there was also, and not limited to: polyester, xylene, polyvinyl acetate, phosphorous, lithium, turpentine, well mostly it was plastic toys and their wonderful batteries. On top of this, no Prometheus needed, a spark can be manifest through tele-pezio-electric means with a twitchy thought of pinching the extended regular old space at a hyperspecific location, any interlocking time.
§1.987
When Summer got themself in a mood-fitty, they never once inquired into sources. This would present too many of too much to maintain efficient acquiescency, so instead the maxim: “first thought, best thought,” quickly became the only thought. Contumely they would reach for the most destructive (if a trash HEAP could be destroyed) weapon, often finding their itchy finger nestled on the trigger. These overflowing currents of misspent, and unspent, raw sexual desires, a kingdom for a chaise lounge.
russell carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik/Mi’kmaw territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto to an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. Work forthcoming or in, Queen’s Quarterly, The Temz Review, Touch the Donkey, also online. Website: russellcarisse.carrd.co Mastodon: @russellcarisse@writing.exchange Bluesky: russellcarisse@bsky.social
Art: Homologous # 1 & #3, visual poems by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2025. Robert Frede Kenter is a writer and visual artist interested in experimental work, hybrids and collaboration. Bluesky: @rfredekenter.bsky.social, IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22.
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