Sewer City

It started like this: a guest was invited over for dinner.

But before that: a couple had scream-sex, that is to say, they screamed sexlessly at one another, during the act. The screams themselves bore no ecstasy.

But before that: a man and a woman are both twenty-eight, and without jobs on a Friday afternoon.

But before that: nothing. Any part of their lives before that Friday afternoon is not important.

It started like this: with the privacy afforded to select pockets of the community during working hours of the week.

What that means: the unemployed.

What that means: not the sort of people to be tangled up with the police or landlords over a noise complaint.

What that means: the man and woman are able to scream.

They are not screaming because the sex is good. The sex is good. They are twenty-eight and unemployed. The sex has to be good. Anyone who has been twenty-eight and unemployed would know this. Small failures become perfectly reasonable considerations for suicide. How could they not be?

So the sex is good. The sex is good, but that is not why they are screaming. Instead, they face one another during sex (the effect is diminished if, say, she is facing away) and scream. They scream continuously, for the entire duration of the act. Screaming, a true scream, nothing airy or high-pitched, but lower, all raw throat, is a vulnerable act. Both the man and the woman feel that peak intimacy can’t be achieved unless they are fully vulnerable, that is to say, being unclothed and inside of one another is no longer enough.

The scream is closer to an animal’s. The scream should, in no no way, mirror human desire.

What this means: it’s easy to get carried away during scream-sex. The vulnerability goes beyond a discomfort, like sitting down naked on someone else’s chair, in front of them. All sorts of things happen when one is in that state.

What this means: the woman ripped out the man’s hair during sex. Initially, this was a mistake. The man had gorgeous brunette hair: elbow-length, curly like lakeweed. He had not yet shown any signs of balding, which the woman took to mean that perhaps he would not ever bald. Really, it was so few hairs she took out: thirty, maybe forty, and the man was already screaming, so of course his screams now were no different, it was only the look on his face, which also, really, was not that different, and how was she to realize her mistake? She didn’t know what came over her, she said, afterwards, really, she couldn’t even remember doing it, only that he had grabbed her hand and in her hand a fistful of strands, maybe it was closer to fifty, no, skin was not still on the hair, he was making that up.

Of course, the man ripped out her hair afterwards. Her hair was not so nice as his, she thought, red and pin-straight except for the finer pieces around her head, which curled but not nicely, only untidily, so she looked always less kempt than she really was, her hair too thick to tie up high on her head, so always it touched her neck.

Really, there was no need for the man to rip her hair out, she thought, and later told him, and really, it was fair to then purposefully rip his hair out, since he had purposefully ripped hers out, and shouldn’t it be even? Well, the man thought, now she has two fistfuls of my hair and he only had one of hers, and so it continued.

It was five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and finally the man finished inside of her. It’s incredible how long someone can prolong an orgasm when they are in acute physical pain.

The woman has recently learned that semen upsets her pH levels. She reminds the man of this. Both the man and the woman are stark naked and stark bald. The man reaches out, pets the woman’s newly shorn head, and flicks her. The woman looks at him. She has married a child.

The man and the woman have been married for three-and-a-half years. Originally, they had a really good reason to get married; they are sure of it. What that original reason was, they can no longer remember, but they also have no good reason to divorce one another. They often forget they are married until they are having sex, or working on a project together, and then it becomes very, very apparent to them that they are married. But so what? They have fish for frying. What is that phrase, he asks her, about the fish? Bigger fish for frying? She doesn’t know. Neither one of them have jobs. And they haven’t made as much progress on their projects as they thought.

What do the man and woman do with the rest of their hours, when they are not accosting one another? They can’t recall. There is a really clever, priceless way they are spending their time, but they don’t have to say. Don’t pester them.

Oh!

It’s coming back now, says the man. Yes. Sewer City. Okay, so they didn’t forget it in the first place. They just didn’t want to share. Some things should be kept private.

What is Sewer City?

Go inside their home and have a look.

Inside their home: maps, diagrams, and drawings of sewers. The maps and diagrams are not fictionalized; they are real American underground sewer layouts. The drawings are nonfiction-hopeful.

What this means: the drawings are not yet in actuality, but one day they will be.

Sewers are the cities of the future. Rats, alligators, turtles, and clowns are ahead of the game, the man and woman explain. Think about it: sewers.

This is not an original idea, but the man and the woman do not realize this, and if they do, they insist their idea is much different.

Sewers are proof.

Proof as to what?

Not as to, proofed. As in safe from something. Child-proofed. But not in this case. Sewers welcome children. Children are welcome in Sewer City.

The man and the woman have dreams of forming communities within these underground labyrinths. This is all they do when they are not screaming or sleeping or eating or ripping one another’s hair out or having sex or observing strangers out of their windows.

Why is the story hung up on Sewer City? That isn’t the point.

The man and the woman are bald. Honestly, it isn’t a good look for them. Sometimes it’s better to beat around the bush but this is not one of those times. They are both naked and both bald and both unemployed, but importantly: both. Much better than if it were only one of them.

But now what?

To work harder at Sewer City.

Sewer City again!

All night they work on Sewer City. They forget to eat dinner and think about the supple quarters of rats. The man salivates onto one of his drawings and has to start the stippling over again. What is he stippling? Wait and see.

They fall asleep mid-morning. It’s Saturday, and mid-morning is when the working members of society wake up. The man pretends for a moment he is still a twenty-one-year-old and the woman pretends for a moment she did not wake from her dream of riding around the skeleton of a giant man-sized rat, the flesh of her thighs catching between the rats shifting bones, pulling her inside of the rat. She wakes straddling the man. They have normal sex.

What that means: the kind of sex parents are imagined to have, after they’ve had children.

Why the emphasis on sex? That’s deeply unimportant to the story.

This is true. The sex, any sex the man and the woman are having, is not important. By now, it’s very clear they are having sex, but even this isn’t important to know.

Honestly, their hair has grown back exceptionally fast. It’s by no means long. But already wisps are showing, and it’s been one night. The woman’s head looks dipped in a setting sun, all red light. She looks a little bit cute, the man thinks. Marriage is cake. What is that idiom?, he asks her. Like cake? A cake walk? Easy as cake? He recalls something about pie or lemons. She doesn’t know. You are supposed to know these things, the man tells her. He doesn’t have an answer as to why. They drink coffee and watch their neighbors out of the window. They live in a large city, on the fourth floor, and everyone in the world is their neighbor. The woman squints because it feels right for her to squint. The man steps out onto the fire escape to smoke. He gets to smoke, seeing as it’s Saturday. There’s nothing special about Saturday, only that he is alive to see it. Other than the smoking, he is in perfect health, other than that he is more than neurotic and more than depressed. This is why he is well-suited to the woman. They cancel one another out, she says, something about a double-negative. The man is not so sure about this.

The weekend comes and goes. There are so many diagrams and maps and drawings and other such sketches of similar and dissimilar fashions and natures and so forth and so forth that the walls, though vigorously contributed to, look the same day after day, despite the many additions. The woman is tired of this. She is the sort of person who wants to see the fruits of her labor, damnit! The man says that is not what Sewer City is about, and the woman says fuck Sewer City, and pins the dead parts of herself and the man to the wall.

What this means: the woman tapes the hair she and the man ripped out to the wall. This is what is missing from Sewer City.

I’m sorry, she says. I didn’t mean it. She and the man have scream-sex again, and they rip out the tufts that have grown back with more vigor than hair has grown back in its life. The man agrees, the wall does look better with the hair pinned to it, and they pin the rest of these new tufts to the wall as well.

The police come. You can’t do that sort of thing on weekends, they say. Best to do that while everyone else is at work. The man and the woman assure the police officers it won’t happen again. Neither officer asks what the screaming was about or if anyone is okay. It would be an incredible amount of paperwork if everything wasn’t alright, so it’s better not to ask.

The police officer standing closest to the door folds his lips in to look at the man. The officer is a bit shorter than the man, and it’s apparent the officer can’t stand it. He gives a small shake of his head, tips his cap, and leaves. The other officer doesn’t even talk. He is just there to film the interaction in case there is combat, so there is a video to circulate around the internet.

The woman hates that he tipped his cap. What is this, 1950?, she asks. The man ignores her. He is thinking about how he and the woman were excluded from “everyone else.” He mentions this to the woman, and they both pretend to be outraged, even though they both secretly like this. So what? They are allowed to secretly like things. The officer didn’t even ask about their wall decorations.

The woman says something else that the man doesn’t hear, and he responds with a sound of agreement. This is how it should be, he thinks.

The next week, their hair has grown back. Not all the way, but significantly. This is insane, the man says. His hair has never grown so fast in his life. The woman makes no comment. She tries to pay as little attention to her hair as possible, as it becomes all the more frustrating when she does take note of it.

Another week passes. The man and the woman’s hair has returned to its normal state, as though it hadn’t been ripped out to begin with. The man and the woman are still both unemployed, and are increasingly pressing cash, or something, what is that saying, the man asks, and this time the woman does know, pressed for cash. Sewer City grows. It has an entertainment complex now: shopping malls and a movie theater, and a playpark for children attached to a McDonald’s. Just one sewage block away, no more than a thirty-second walk: a cannabis store, out of sight for the children but near enough for parents to duck out briefly. What more could the people want?

Monday morning the couple decides that’s unimaginative. They’ve just modeled Sewer City after their own above-ground city. Sewer City is going to have the same fucking problems as the city now. They need to be thinking bigger. The man and the woman are recreating a society they hate, only underground.

The problem: they can’t imagine anything different.

One can imagine how debilitating this realization is. The man and the woman doubt their intelligence, creativity, and reasons to live. They aren’t fit for life. They plan out a double-suicide and have sex instead. The sex quickly becomes scream-sex, which now automatically turns into ripping out one another’s hair. Again, they pin it to the wall.

And so a habit develops. They continue to tear out one another’s hair during sex, and their hair grows back each time, almost faster, tenacious, as though the hair wants to be ripped out.

The man and the woman continue to work on Sewer City but they are unable to plan and scheme and draw out faster than they rip out and regrow hair. What does this mean? The wall is covered more in human hair than it is in Sewer City. This goes on for several months, until it really does look like the man and the woman will have to start eating juicy rat quarters, they are so goddamn unemployed. But they try not to think about this. They don’t have time to eat because between Sewer City and scream-sex there is little opportunity to do anything else but catch up on their accruing sleep debt.

The man and the woman grow, rip out, tape up, and regrow enough hair to cover the entire wall of the apartment. It doesn’t look like a wall at all but the side of a large, furry creature, something reddish-brown, like a behemoth-wolf, a mammoth, complete with shorter tufts and full strands several feet long. The man and the woman have grown fond of this wall (they love the wall) over the course of these months, and that’s just one wall. They’ve made quick work of the other walls. Beneath it all is still Sewer City, though increasingly buried. The man and the woman have begun to accept this. They have other happenings going on in their life right now. They’ve begun to brush the wall's hair and braid it. At night, the woman washes the wall's hair gently using Johnson’s tear-free shampoo. She scoops the wall’s hair up and away from the roots as she washes, as soap stings.

Another month passes, and the man goes back to work. He did not discuss it with the woman. There was no need. It’s the right thing to do, and the woman knew without him saying that he meant work, and that was that. The woman begins taking supplements to help her hair grow faster. The man works in construction, and he comes home sore, and tired, and he often falls asleep before he reaches the end of the bedtime story he reads aloud to the wall. The woman takes off his shoes and unbuttons his pants so he can sleep more comfortably. She lies down next to him, between his body and the wall. She thinks it would be best to sleep with the wall between her body and the man’s, but on the other side of the wall are their neighbors. Probably the same neighbor that called the cops on us that one time, says the man, as if it were so long ago, but it really does feel like so long ago, and the woman blushes. She and the man don’t sleep in their own bed anymore; they don’t want to be apart from the wall.

In the mornings, the woman rises early with the man and makes him a packed lunch for work. She makes the wall a packed lunch for school. She eats the crusts she’s cut off of both of their sandwiches. During his lunch break, the man comes home and has sex with the woman, and they tear out all of their new growth hair and add it to the wall. Sewer City is buried twice-over, once underneath the Earth, once underneath their hair. They’ve changed their minds about the other one’s baldness; each one prefers the other bald now. It would be wrong to keep their hair.

Many nights, the man wakes up again late into the evening, so late the clock has changed to single digits again, and he and the woman have sex as though they have just met. This is not to say the sex is passionate or exciting or new, but rather awkward, a clumsy fumbling through the event, as both are strangers to one another's body and will not say so. They treat one another like foreign objects. The man is usually the one to initiate the sex, and he is also usually the one to fake an orgasm.

Sometimes, the man falls asleep when he is inside of the woman, and she tries not to let this hurt her feelings. But how can she? What the man does not know: the woman dreams every night about having sex with rats. Ha! A delicious secret. The woman looks at the man and thinks he is looking at her, thinking she only thinks of the wall. But she doesn’t! At any given time, the woman is thinking about her legs pressed on top of the rat's legs. Sometimes, while the man is inside of her. She loves this.

Occasionally, the woman does worry that this has an effect on their relationship. How couldn’t she? How could it not? But then she thinks: it’s important not to lose sight of Sewer City. Rats are integral to Sewer City. How couldn’t they be? Slyly, the woman brings up rats to the man, and they talk about them: the man pensive, serious, the woman coy, delighted. They are talking about her other lovers! And the man doesn’t realize!

Sewer City shines above them like a beacon. The man and the woman have begun to move their Sewer City project to the ceiling, to make more wall space. The tunnels and diagrams of Sewer City form constellations that the man and woman point to while lying on their backs in bed. Sewer City. SewerCitySewerCitySewerCity. The man and the woman vow to work on Sewer City more during the weekends. Maybe they can wake up an hour earlier in the mornings.

The woman returns to work. She wants to be on her boss’s time, not the wall’s time. The wall is left at home with plenty of food and the television turned on. Yes, the woman says, she knows she’s treating the wall like a dog. But who can blame her? She and the man are worked like dogs. It’s a dog world, the man adds, or dog eats world, what is the phrase? Dog-eat-dog world, the woman corrects him. Yes, says the man. The woman knows that in a perfect world, the wall is going to piano lessons and learning another language, and reading books. But it’s not a perfect world. It’s a fucking dog’s world, the man says again. Everyone and everything is a dog.

Sewer City has placed a permanent ban on dogs. NO DOGS ALLOWED! written in the crude, happy cuneiform of a dog, so dogs can read it too.

The woman’s job description is vague and not a description at all. It’s just words. What the woman actually does is the same job as those people at airports, the ones wearing the orange vests and waving the light-up sticks to direct planes, or something. No, not TSA, the ones standing near the runway. What are those people called, again?, she asks the man. He doesn’t know either. But anyone who has been to an airport and has looked outside at the plane traffic would know.

The woman doesn’t work at the airport; she works at the city dump, but it’s the same thing. She wears an orange vest and directs garbage trucks. It’s exciting, the woman tells herself. She is waiting for someone to throw away a body.

The woman is tired from her job, but it is a purposeful sort of tired. It was no good when just the man was working, she thought. They couldn’t afford family vacations. Now, because she works, they can go on holiday to Florida. Isn’t that nice? Florida is full of alligators, the woman tells the man over their morning coffee. It is assumed breakfast follows this coffee but it doesn’t. Just because the man and woman both work now, and have big plans for Florida, doesn’t mean they can afford food all the way. Besides, now that the woman has found employment, she has two work lunches to pack instead of one. And another thing: the man constantly owes both the downstairs neighbors and the upstairs neighbors money. It’s his business why.

The man is too excited about the alligators to drink his morning coffee.

Don’t think the man and woman aren’t still tearing out one another’s hair, and pinning it to the wall. They are. They’ve run out of wall space and unfortunately, it’s begun to encircle a wide perimeter around the ceiling. Sewer City shrinks further and further into the center of the ceiling like a celestial sinkhole, taking the man and woman with it.

The man and the woman begin to only talk about each other, and themselves, in the third person. This will help the man and the woman work, they decide. They need to treat one another like counterparts, constituents. The man is not all that sure what “constituent” means, and neither is the woman. That’s fine. What they do need to know: the flooring of Sewer City. Should Sewer City have flooring or paving? Should Sewer City be tile? Brick? Concrete? Stone? What the woman has failed to consider—

But the woman cuts him off. She hates it when the man does that, talks to her as though she is much younger than him. She’s actually four months older than him. See? The man says. The woman says childish things like that, that’s why he does it. The woman asks when she’s ever pointed out what the man’s failed to consider, and the man points out that the woman is always welcome to do so, it’s not his fault she doesn’t remind him. The woman has already predicted this is how the argument would go. The man ends every fight with his reasoning that it isn’t his fault that she hasn’t— Hasn’t what? Well it’s situational. It depends on the argument. So he can’t think of a reason? He can think of a reason, it just depends.

Sewer City should be stone. Stone tiled. Stone brick tiling. Of course. Of course, of course. Off course. Par for the course. Perfect corpse.

Stone brick tiling. Something water absorbent! Can an underground city experience drought? The man and the woman hadn’t thought of these things. One of the walls has broken its electronic tablet. Yes, more than one. These things happen. Before this, it was playing a game where a shark grows bigger by eating people. The shark grows, and grows, and grows, and grows. The man and woman have lost track of their walls. They are somewhere around, they say. They both fall asleep that evening even before the bedtime story.

The man invites someone over from his work. Jesus H. Christ, the woman says. The man glares at her. Everyone can hear you, he says. Jesus Fucking Christ, the woman says. She lives to antagonize the man, the man thinks. The woman says she would say “fuck” even if she were the last person on Earth. The man says he bets she would too.

Truthfully, the “H.” and then the “Fucking” were a cushion between the woman and her feelings. The man does not pick up on this, and how could he have? The woman doesn’t want a stranger in their home. It’s their home. It’s private. And theirs. She doesn’t want a stranger coming into the home and looking at their Sewer City planning. That’s just something for the two of them right now. It isn’t ready yet.

And the walls, the man tells her. Yes, says the woman. Wait. The man is explaining her feelings to her. So then what? Asks the man. This is the problem: he is not a mind-reader. The woman isn’t expecting him to mind-read, My God, she exclaims. You said “my,” the man says, that’s not third-person. You said “you” the woman said, so the man isn’t much better either. We should get a cat, the woman says. Fucking hell, the man says, they can’t afford a cat.

Later, the woman explains that Sewer City feels more private, an intrusion. Is it really not that way for the man either? She thought it was as special to him as it was to her. The woman can’t remember the last time she felt this hurt. She feels silly. Silly isn’t even the word she should use to describe how she feels but she doesn’t have a word for it. She hates Sewer City. She doesn’t want to look at it.

The man apologizes. He loves Sewer City more than anything, he tells her, really, he is more sure about Sewer City than he is about anything in his life. Besides her. The woman knows he is just saying that. But he isn’t, the man says, truly, it’s because he believes so much in Sewer City he invited a guest over, to witness Sewer City even before its completion. Incomplete projects are delicate, he explains to the woman, but not Sewer City, that’s how solid Sewer City is. The woman needs time to think about this. She shuts herself up in the closet and makes rat sculptures for three weeks. The man finally opens the closet door to make the woman drink something, even just water, but she’s run out of rat-making supplies and is making snakes now. Snakes everywhere. Snakes dangling from the light bulb and from the coat hangers. Snakes coiled into shoes. The woman throws a snake at the man, and the snake curls around him like a snap-bracelet, sticky and metallic. Jesus Christ, the man says. The woman has to find work somewhere else. Yeah? The woman says. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’s found her calling. The man punches several holes into the wall, crams her sculptures into them, and patches the wall over. The woman has weak knuckles. She can’t retrieve the sculptures, and she goes back to work. Besides, she says, she missed her work lunches. Before she worked she had sandwich crusts and strawberry tops and now she has hot-pockets and low-calorie yogurt. And chewing gum! That’s all she and the man do all day long: chew gum. Chew chew chew chew chew chew chew.

What’s happened to the walls?

Nothing. Thank God.

Sewer City has no timeline, the man says. Just like life. The woman doesn’t really know what this means. Neither does the man, but he felt it was the right thing to say.

The guest finally comes over for dinner. The man and the woman forgot all about their evening plans, and the man is in one of his moods. Yes. Those moods. The woman is in one of those moods too, but in her womanish way. What does that mean? Nothing. What it says. Honestly, the man and the woman were gearing up to eat in silence, and now a guest is over. Well, reasons the man, why should that stop them? Just because a guest is over, does that mean they have to talk to it or something? What the fuck, says the woman. A guest isn’t an “it.” I know that, the man says. The man knows that. He was just trying to be funny. The woman isn’t so sure. They can invite a guest over and not talk to it, the woman says. She can be funny too. Sure they can, the man says. Perhaps that is even preferable to the guest. The guest knocks on the door. The man receives the guest, appraises it, turns to the woman, and says it’s here. The guest laughs. It assumes the man is joking. The man pulls the woman aside, into the closet-slash-sculpture-sepulcher. Isn’t this what you wanted? The woman shifts her weight from side to side as though she is warming up for physical activity. What’s this about? Her feet are doing their nervous wiggling; he can see the tips of her shoes bubbling up like chewing gum, like soup. The man licks his lips. They’ve got duck cooking for dinner: a delicacy, even though ducks are absolutely everywhere, swimming in filthy ponds in the city parks. The man and woman can see ducks right now, from the window of their ten-storey apartment building, right in the urban spleen.

Obviously, they do not tell any of this to the guest, and not just because they aren’t speaking to it. The guest asks to use the bathroom, but that is where the woman hid their more personal drawings of Sewer City. She and the man exchange a look. Strike one, the man says, looking between the woman and the guest. The guest is starting to get a little uncomfortable.

The duck is taken out of the oven before it has finished cooking. The inside is still a little pink. The guest has never seen pink duck before, but it also isn’t sure what color the duck ought to be, so it doesn’t say anything. It’s important to pay homage to our ancestors, the man says, looking at the woman. The woman agrees. Their ancestors probably did not have time to finish cooking the duck.

Oh no, the woman says. What they’ve both failed to consider: the delicacies of Sewer City. But the man doesn’t think this is important. They can’t think about the finer things of Sewer City if there’s not even a Sewer City to begin with. But there is, the woman says. There is there is there is. The guest looks around the room. The man turns his chair around and begins talking to the wall. He is clumsy and sausage-fingered but he is still determined to learn how to braid the wall’s hair, if only half as good as the woman.

The man announces the woman and the duck are not so dissimilar before he begins eating it with glee. The woman doesn’t eat. She loses her appetite when she isn’t relaxed and she can’t relax while hosting. The guest doesn’t eat either. Sure, it has never seen cooked duck, but the guest is now almost entirely sure that duck shouldn’t be pink.

The wall begins to make a sound only the man can hear. The woman can’t stand when this happens; it makes her feel excluded and terribly jealous. The woman is tired of feeling silly and bested in her own home; she feels that she haunts the man and the rooms. She feels humiliated that things are important to her, and others can see that she has things important to her. And then how do those things respond to her? The man? Sewer City? The walls. An endless cycle of inferiority; she is tired of her tirade of shame, around and around she rides on the carousel of needy mediocrity like a knight on a plastic horse. And what is there to defend? She wants to get off the sick carnival ride that is her existence.

The man doesn’t hear any of this because he is still talking to the wall. The guest doesn’t hear any of this because it is trying to inconspicuously share its location to its friends and family, just in case. The man realizes the duck is a little more than underdone, the duck is raw. He accuses his wife of poisoning him. Wife? The woman asks. The man never refers to her as his wife. So they are married after all. The man doesn’t want her to change the subject. He knows what she’s doing. She might be an idiot, but she isn’t stupid. No, the woman says, he’s got the phrase wrong. He should have said: He might be an idiot, but he isn’t stupid. No, the man says, he’s changed the phrase on purpose. The woman isn’t so sure. She thinks the man is tired of being wrong and just wanted to call her an idiot.

The woman gets up from the table. She is going to scratch her sculptures back out of the closet wall if she has to.

The woman returns. Her fingernails are soft and not great for scratching.

Because someone is over, and the man and woman are not common animals, despite living in Dog World, they do not rip out one another’s hair. Instead, they take turns standing up from the table, walking around to the other one, cutting several locks of hair, and then pinning it to the wall. The man and woman behave like cuckoo-clock dolls, moving in circular, rhythmic patterns. The guest is a little bit transfixed. The guest is a little bit uncomfortable. The man and woman finish and shake their new dandelion-puff heads. The guest reaches for water, set just to the side of the table, a pitcher and three glasses. The woman slaps its hand away.

The guest leaves. It has had enough, it decides. The man and the woman feel a sense of relief they weren’t expecting to. Fucking hell, the man says. That was terrible. The woman agrees. They don’t even consider how the guest might feel, and why should they? The guest has left. It jumped ship. The woman hopes sharks eat it before it gets back to shore.

Sewer City feels more real to them than ever before. They are so close to it, the man says. It feels achievable, within grabbing distance, no longer something looming in front of them, just out of their reach. The man and woman rip out their bathroom appliances: the bathtub, the toilet, the sink. They throw these appliances out of the bathroom window, ripping holes into the wall to make the window larger. They don’t even watch the porcelain bathtub shatter against cement. They don’t even look for pedestrians. None of their neighbors call the police because the police are too busy. No one calls the landlord because serf-tenants aren’t allowed to do that; serfs have to submit a maintenance request through an online portal and that can take up to three weeks, even though the website says forty-eight hours. The man and the woman keep tunneling. The noise is terrible. They finish their bathroom and keep tunneling into third-floor pipes, and then the second, and the first, tunneling tunneling tunneling. They are going to see Sewer City. Sewer City Sewer City Sewer City Sewer City Sewer City. Forever and ever and ever and ever.

Jamie Good graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University. Her fictional short story, “Tacenda,” won The Word’s Faire’s That’s Absurd! Anthology competition. She has essays and short stories published in a small handful of literary magazines and journals, including The Writing Disorder, Wire’s Dream Magazine, and Lammergeier. Her greatest ambition in life is to be taken back into the fairy world.