[Shit]

By Rion Amilcar Scott

Dearest Slumlord—
What is it they say about shit? That it rolls down hills? So too it rolls down walls and bursts from pipes and bubbles up from drains until your whole world is shit.
My first indication that shit world was coming? A smell in the distance. Faint at first, a mere whiff, just a hint of sewage in the air. The vague notes of shit were so light we could ignore the scent, pretend it wasn’t floating through our nostrils. The shit was all in our heads. We became shitheads.
Then I’d forget something. Or maybe I couldn’t recall a commonplace word. Or I’d burn myself by grasping absently at the hot metal iron of the stove. Or sometimes I’d put on my shoes wrong. Something ridiculous like that. After all those instances I was forced to admit to myself that the scent was destroying me, or worse yet, that it was altering my body chemistry, making me more shit than man.
I had inhaled so much of it that I could feel my brain coat with shit residue. A regular shit-for-brains.
Then it bubbled up in the shower drain one cold morning, brown and liquid.
What in the fuck? I called, stumbling from the bathroom. I noticed it also filling the sink with its filth.
There was a pipe standing outside the bathroom. Once a long while ago, that very pipe became coated with dewy condensation and this activated my allergies, backing up the plumbing of my sinuses until liquid poured from my swollen ears. I saved myself with a dehumidifier I ran from morning to night. That same pipe now had become covered in dewy shit, and they don’t make deshitifiers.
I stepped from the apartment, drunk from the smell of shit. I nearly smashed my fingers through the phone dialing maintenance, and when I got them on the line, a heavily accented voice replied, Shit? What you mean shit? What you got a clogged toilet? That not no emergency.
No, I replied. It’s on the walls.
Silence came between us like the line going dead. My ear was sweating onto my phone, covering its glowing face in slippery wetness. The bubble of silence, the perspiring ear—all this made me imagine us sitting across a table from one another in a darkened room, watching each other, breaking eye contact when awkwardness set in, both waiting for the other to speak.
On the walls? he said finally. Okay, we be there.
I stood outside the building waiting for what must have been an hour. The late afternoon warmth turned into evening cold.
Mr. _______, I heard a voice call and I saw two men walking toward me. You Mr._________?
Uh, yes, I replied.
They wore blue maintenance uniforms, but they were shaped oddly. Flat and broad like gingerbread men. As the men got closer, the scent hit me and soon I realized they were made entirely of shit.
What else could I do, my slumlord, but run. I heard the squish of their steps chasing after me.
Shit! I cried.
Mr. ________, the shit called. Come back, Mr. ________!
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I saw the sewer opening at the curb. Probably it was my shit brain trying to commune with its kind. With some effort, I slipped myself into the opening and I peeked out to see their shitty legs passing by.
I stood watching the street for a little bit until I heard a murmuring below me, bubbling voices. Shit hands reached up through the darkness to snatch at my legs. Why had I not smelled them? Of course, I thought with my shit brain. I’m in a sewer. The smell is everywhere. My nose had become blind. The smell of shit wasn’t just in the air around me—it quite literally was the air around me.
I forced myself through the opening and ran to the only place I could go—back home[1].
When I arrived, I noticed a note on the door announcing that maintenance was working inside.
Hello, I called, pushing the door cautiously. Hello.
Mr. _________, a voice replied. We in here.
Here meant the bathroom. I looked around at the walls and noted the absence of shit. The pipe outside the bathroom was covered in condensation, but no shit. Even the tub and the sink stood clean.
A shit-crusted maintenance jumpsuit lay on the bathroom floor and one maintenance person, a monster made of excrement, stood towering over the toilet. His maintenance jumpsuit was blue-gray and shitty. The water of the bowl sat there all brown and soupy. I closed my eyes briefly and looked away.
The walls are clean, I said.
No shit, Sherlock, he replied, chuckling. He started unbuttoning his maintenance uniform, but he stopped to point to a boxy gray contraption in the corner. It sported an array of knobs, switches and colorful glowing lights. Deshitifier, the Gingerbread Shit Man said. He resumed removing his uniform as he continued speaking. Run it for an hour every day or more if the shit returns, but I don’t think you’ll need to do it for more than an hour a day for a week. The Gingerbread Shit Man tossed his uniform to the floor and climbed into the toilet bowl. We’ll be back for the deshitifier in a week. Could you do me a favor?
He sank into the water. Soon only his head peeked out above the surface.
Little help with the flushing, he said.
Of course, I replied.
His head twirled and disappeared down the drain. I hit a switch on the deshitifier and rocked to its gentle hum.

Sincerely,

[1] Yes, my slumlove, I thought about running to the rental office to see you, but I looked and smelled a mess. Just the thought of you smelling the neighborhood’s shit on me felt like a horror unto itself.

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.

Illustration: Josh Burwell is an artist and illustrator from Mississippi currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. You can find more of his work at jburwell.com or on Instagram @jburwell.

Up Next

On the Road to Nowhere | William Eggleston 414 Reviews