Bivatt

Bivatt

“There’s a glob goblin in the garbage,” my father chuckled. He sure loved his alliterations, but most of the time they made no sense to me.

“What are you talking about?”

My father’s smile faltered for a moment, apparently frustrated that I hadn’t decoded his strange message. “Look at the splat in the garbage. It’s shaped like a hand reaching up.”

“You need to find a real hobby,” I muttered before turning toward the kitchen to make a sandwich. If my dad wanted to make splat hands or whatever, he could pick up painting or literally anything other than looking through the garbage.

As usual, I spread jelly on my first piece of bread, then reached for the peanut butter. It was almost empty; once again, my brother had left the tiniest amount possible without having to rinse and recycle the jar. I silently swore at him as I did the chore for him, my bread woefully under-peanut-buttered. Luckily, there was another jar of Jif in the cabinet, so I ripped off the seal and went to the garbage to throw it away.

I nearly yelped in surprise when I saw the hand—or more accurately, the claw—reaching up from the rubble as if asking for help. The knuckles were knobby, the fingers bony and sharp, so it took a long moment for me to realize that it was just a splatter of gravy on the white trash bag and not an actual hand reaching up to pull me into the trash. Still, the image was unsettling enough to make me want to close the half-empty (or half-full) bag. I had no excuse to do that, though, since the bag wasn’t near full and trash day wasn’t for another four days.

I tried to avoid the garbage can in the kitchen, but could only do that so much. Every time I opened it, the hand seemed to stretch higher, the fingers in different positions. I could see why my father had called it a goblin; that hand looked like it didn’t belong on any human.

Eventually, I poured a glass of water down the side of the trash bag, washing away the hand, but when I opened it again a few hours later the hand was back, reaching for help or flesh or heaven-knows-what-else. I had a nagging feeling that it was reaching for me. I knew how crazy it sounded, but that hand wasn’t natural.

The day before garbage day, I found a bottle of bug poison. It was covered in DANGER and FLAMMABLE and DO NOT TOUCH WITH BARE HANDS warnings and symbols. Perfect. I told my dad that it was expired (it wasn’t) and he told me to wash it out several times, and then wash my hands even more. He handed me a pair of safety goggles, which I thought was a bit much, but I took them so he wouldn’t argue.

I took the bottle straight to the trash can and opened both. Before I poured the chemicals into the trash, I hesitated. The hand looked folded up, as if it were cowering. For a moment, I felt like I was about to kill a puppy. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a sweet little creature, but a monster that had been reaching for me since I had first seen it. I poured the poison into the trash.

There was a feeble whine from the refuse as the poison ran over the hand, which shriveled up and washed away without fighting back. I poured out as much of the poison as I could before donning my goggles and rinsing out the bottle in the kitchen sink. After putting the empty bottle in the recycling bin, I closed and opened the trash lid several times to make sure the hand wasn’t going to reappear. It didn’t.

The next day, I watched in glee as the garbage truck backed up near the dumpsters. The arm reached out to grab the first dumpster and did so with ease, emptying it into the compactor. The second dumpster, though was knocked over. The bag, corroded by the poison I’d poured into it, split open.

There was no time to react, and barely enough to register what was going on. Several trails of putrid liquid sped toward me, climbing the porch stairs with ease. Each trail ended with a hand, and right before they reached me, they hesitated. I almost sighed with relief, remembering my own hesitation before I’d poured the bug poison into the trash. But then the fingers twitched, the trails lengthened, and they raced up my legs. The poison must have become a part of the liquid, because the fetid rivers burned as they reached over me. I screamed at the pain, but that only allowed the vile liquid to run down my throat. They only left me alone when I was curled on the floor, wheezing with pain through vocal cords that no longer functioned.

Lore/Layout by Bibbit