Travis Flatt
The other bottle boys carry Micah up and down trash mountain, crunching rotten plastic beneath their cloth-wrapped feet. They scream triumph. Oh, they parade!
Not every other bottle boy, not Little David. Little David sulks at the foot of trash mountain, in the husk of a skeletally-rusted tin shack, whispers to the blade-like bones that that should be him, how Micah stole his shift in the bottle mine, a shift tunneling through the sludge and tar and muck of disintegrating diapers, soggy cardboard boxes, rotten athleisure wear, to mine out Evian and Fiji bottles in hopes of an unsnapped seal—a bottle heavy and full.
Of water.
Clean, pure water.
But Little David’s hand—he’d torn fingers from his gloves on his last shift, then kept pawing, papercut his pointer finger on an undecayed corner of posterboard; the hand was ruled by the elders infected.
The infected cannot work. The infected might infect water.
True water, the water the bottle boys find safely sealed.
Not dead water. Not the ruined bogs or the toxic soup lakes that stink up the scrubland around trash mountain. Not the ashy soot that drizzles night and day from the smog-darkened clouds and gunks and grits together tires, medical waste—so much plastic—and congeals to form trash mountain.
“Build fire!” sing the syringe girls. The syringe girls, the women who monkey ahead into the bottle boys’ tunnels, pluck out with nimble, calloused fingers metallic snags, speeding the dig. “Build fire!” They drag dog carcasses, cracked and splintery hunks of mobile homes, to gather at the summit for a boiling pyre.
Around the reeking mound of flesh and wood that the syringe girls stack, first come the elders. Next, the bottle boys. They circle and bow as the syringe girls beat sparks from steel and iron. Little David skulks about the edges with the other infected, waiting to hear who’ll get the first taste of real water.
Not boiled and reboiled bog water they’ve learned to chew and choke down.
The whisper is Micah, Micah the Finder, though some say it should be a rat hunter to boost his strength. To grant him long life. So he might soar through the air and cast lightning from his eyes like the Water Drinkers of the before times.
With a long, aluminum pole, the syringe girls pass the bottle—“careful now, don’t melt the plastic!”—high over the pyre to purge the ubiquitous germs. They pass it once, twice, then Micah is called forward.
To drink.
Now dashes in Little David. He leaps, snatches the bottle from the pole’s rubber clamp, and grips it in his swollen, bandaged fingers. It’s his—be he cast out to the dogs, cats, and rats. He runs up trash mountain, tears off the cap with his teeth. Warm water pours down his chin. He drinks. It is good. Though the other bottle boys come screaming after, he stops and gulps, tears clearing streaks down his face.
The other bottle boys tackle Little David, slit the plastic, lick. Discover it dry. Despair.
Little David, trampled into the grime, forgotten, grins, his belly full and sloshing. Drunk on power, queasy with puissance, he unwinds the bandages from his fingers, lays a hatchet in the abandoned ashes of the boiling pyre until red hot, cleaves off the offending fingers. The wounds spray a jet of pink water.
He is elemental now; he rushes to the summit of trash mountain, lowers his rags, and relieves himself in a glorious, clear arc, shivering with joy. He will leave this place. He raises his hands upward to the gloom and waits to be called into the sky, leaps, leaps again, certain he will, on his next jump, cling to the air and ascend.
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. He is a 2026 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow. His first chapbook, Five Stories, was released with Sand & Gravel Press in 2025, and his stories appear or are forthcoming with Pithead Chapel, Ghost Parachute, Flash Frog, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere.