Tom Gammarino

Waste Management

I don’t love earthworms—they’re an invasive species in Hawaiʻi—but the way little Mira stroked the wriggling creature with her pinky was highly cute, and soon Luke and I were smiling at each other across the garden.

That was progress. We’d been a bit chilly with each other since I’d suggested at breakfast that we stop wasting our shit. I’d seen an ad the prior evening for a waterless toilet, The Dirtilizer, that turned excrement into perfectly good, odor-free fertilizer right there in your bathroom, and I wanted one. Seeing as we grew nearly a third of the vegetables we used in our vegan taco truck ourselves, it just made sense. With a Dirtilizer, we could stop wasting money on the inorganic stuff, not to mention all that water with each flush.

But Luke wasn’t having it. “Why do you have to take things so far?” he’d said.

“What’s ‘so far’ about it? You do know your crap has to go somewhere, right? That it doesn’t magically disappear when you flush?”

“I’m not an idiot, Lani.”

“Then what’s your problem? Isn’t it better for us to use it here than to send it out to sea?” I knew that if anything would make him reconsider, it was this. We both loved the ocean. We’d even met while surfing dawn patrol one gorgeous, glassy morning on the North Shore.

“I just think you have to draw the line somewhere,” he said while he put his plate in our dishwasher.

I rolled my eyes.

“And anyway, Lani, think about it. Do you really want us to eat food grown in our own shit? I realize you mean well, but that’s kind of gross, no?”

I hit him with a factoid I’d learned from the ad: “In China they used to have collectors who would go house to house to pay for it. They called it ‘night soil.’” 

Luke screwed up his face while he emptied his coffee grounds into our compost bin.

“I think I need to go for a walk,” I said. This confrontation was making me feel married in exactly the way I’d never wanted.

“I bet if you ask around,” Luke said, “you’ll find most people agree with me. You think our customers want to eat food grown in our shit? Would you be comfortable advertising that?”

But I was already halfway out the door.

It was Luke’s sense of entitlement that got to me. Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder because his family had a lot more money than mine ever would. In any case, humanity had been making serious progress for over a generation now, and I had strong feelings about our duty to keep it up. We might never get the monarch butterfly or the Marshall Islands back, but we were still on track to avert most of the worst-case scenarios.

Of course, I already knew that people could be weird about their shit—I don’t exactly love it either, and everyone remembers the culture wars that erupted in the US when President Yang began subsidizing the purchase of bidet attachments to save forests and prevent fecal-oral transmission of CHOBAD-36. Evolutionarily speaking, I knew it made sense that feces grossed us out since it was like eighty percent bacteria, but Luke’s automatic aversion to even talking about it really annoyed me.

At least Mira was giving me some hope for the next generation. We’d known her and her parents, Kevin and Ginny, a little in passing, but our lives became more entangled when Mira knocked on our door one Saturday morning a couple of months before to ask if she could play with our Pomeranian, Kona. Her eyes darted around nervously and endearingly as she asked. We said yes, of course, and she ended up playing with the dog for all of thirty seconds before growing transfixed by our TV. We’d been watching a documentary about the bioremediation of the Ala Wai Canal, so we’d assumed Mira was interested in that, but when Ginny showed up a little later at the door, we started to get the full picture: “What do you think you’re doing, little lady? You know how we feel about screens.” Then, turning to me: “We’re Returners.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know.”

“No worries. You don’t fight drugs by pretending they don’t make you feel good.”

I felt judged, but I let it go.

“I hope Mira wasn’t bothering you. She’s desperate for a dog, but my husband’s allergic.”

“She’s welcome to play with Kona any time,” Luke said.

Ginny smiled. “Let’s get going, Mira. We don’t want to be late for the dentist.”

I marveled that TV was forbidden while modern dentistry was somehow okay. Actually, that was my problem with the whole Returner movement. The basic logic made a kind of sense—technology had led to the atrocities of the climate crisis, so rather than double-down on it, we should return to a simpler way of life—but the rules seemed so arbitrary sometimes. Bicycles were allowed, but cars were forbidden––never mind that bicycles were technology too, or that most cars were now a hundred percent solar-powered. When pressed, Returners liked to cite a hundred-year-old article about democratic versus authoritarian “technics,” but it seemed to me there was an awful lot of gray area.

After that, Mira began randomly popping by on evenings and weekends. At first, I suspected that our TV was the real draw, not Kona, but it soon became clear that she really did like hanging out with us. We’d decided years ago that we were never going to make any babies ourselves, so it was sort of nice to act like hanai parents to this curious little girl. We’d play board games together, read books, bake cookies, make arts and crafts, strum our ukuleles. Above all, though, Mira enjoyed helping us in the garden.

The earthworm arched its body as if it were greatly enjoying Mira’s pinky caresses. In any case, Mira was clearly having fun, so we were too.

A week or so later, Ginny asked us if we wouldn’t mind watching Mira for the whole day while she and Kevin went canvassing for some Returner politician. Luke and I had been on the fence about whether to work that day anyway since the university was off for Earth Week and most of our customers were students filling their bellies between classes. Ginny offered to pay us, but we declined.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Mira. “Beach?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

We took her to Kailua and brought our body boards. It was a sunny day, and the green-blue waves were just big enough for an eleven-year-old. While Luke showed off in deeper water, I stayed on the inside with Mira. At one point, she saw Luke do a forward spin and wanted to learn how to do that, so I tried teaching her the easier version where you use one of your hands as a rudder. She never quite nailed it—it took me months the first time—but I was impressed with her tenacity in trying. Long after Luke and I had gone back to our blanket on the beach, she was still at it, shifting her weight on the board and trying different hand positions. She only came in when she got stung on the thigh by a Portuguese man o’war.

Luke and I had been stung countless times, so we knew how much it hurt, but again Mira impressed us. Even as her eyes welled up with tears, she remained calm. Luke warmed the sting with his coffee thermos, and I tried distracting her by telling her how the man o’war wasn’t a jellyfish but a whole colony of organisms. It worked. She was fascinated. I searched up a video on my phone to explain better than I could. 

“Can I hold it?” she asked.

“Hold what?”

“Your phone.”

“Oh.”

I knew it was against her parents’ wishes, but the poor girl was in pain, and they weren’t here.

After the beach, we took her out for vegan sushi. Luke wanted to go home after that, but I had another idea, something I’d been meaning to do ever since I learned about the Dirtilizer. I gave Mira the choice. “We could go home and finish that puzzle we started…”

“Or what?”

“Or we could take a tour of the wastewater treatment plant on Sand Island. We can make it if we leave now.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where they clean up poop,” Luke said, clearly believing this would dissuade her.

“Let’s do that,” she said.

I knew she wouldn’t let me down.

“You can count me out,” Luke said.

He took the bus home while Mira and I got to the plant just in time for the tour.

When we and a handful of others were all standing around by the aeration tank in orange hardhats, our eager guide said, “Fact: every cubic meter of wastewater contains enough energy to purify four times that amount.”

Mira’s face was already filled with wonder. Meanwhile, I was wondering how much her parents would hate it if they knew we were here. They believed in dentistry, they had to believe in plumbing, right?

“We’ve known this for a long time,” the guide went on, “but we’ve only recently figured out how to harness all that energy so that we can be a full, closed-loop facility. From this so-called waste you see before you, we manage to produce 100% of the energy needed to run the plant, as well as enough to power all the island’s buses.”

Mira’s eyebrows shot up and she mouthed the word “Luke” as if to say Luke’s on a poop bus and he doesn’t even know it. I chuckled.

The guide continued: “We also produce bioplastics that can be used to make everything from sneakers to bicycles, as well as tons of phosphorous-rich fertilizer for local farms.”

If Luke were with us, this was the moment I’d have made my I-told-you-so-face, though it wasn’t lost on me that he could have argued we were doing good by contributing, flush by flush, to this energy mill. In any case, I was extremely impressed with the technology. I even got choked up at one point thinking about how far we’d come as a civilization. Science was like magic but real.

After the tour, we visited the gift shop, and I bought Mira a water bottle she was really excited about. It was made from bioplastic and filtered out 100% of viruses and bacteria. “I can drink puddles!” she said.

It wasn’t obvious to me whether I was treating Mira the way I’d have wanted to treat a biological daughter or the way I’d wished my parents had treated me. Maybe it was the same thing. In any case, I saw myself in her. Unlike me, though, Mira was going to do great things for the world someday, I was sure of it. I just made tacos.

We learned the impossible news from Mira’s older cousin when she knocked on our door one evening. She begged us not to tell Kevin and Ginny how we’d found out.

“You’re certain it’s cholera?” Luke asked.

“She’s vomiting and has rice-water stools.”

I nodded. “But how would she have gotten it?”

“She was drinking from the stream. I guess there’s poop in there.”

“But she was using a filter bottle. We bought it for her.”

She shook her head. “Uncle Kevin took it away from her, so she was experimenting with using coffee filters, sand, gravel, and stuff like that.”

“Okay, but surely she was vaccinated.”

Again, she shook her head. “Returners think vaccines are authoritarian.”

That was news to us, and on hearing it, Luke stormed right over to their house. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to, so I just stood in our doorway and watched.

Kevin was a good fifty pounds heavier than Luke. He’d always been friendly with us, but Luke had never violently banged on his door before.

“How’s she doing?” Luke asked pointedly.

“Very tired, but she’ll be okay.”

“Or not,” Luke said.

Kevin glared. “Who told you?”

“I don’t understand you, Kevin. You realize we’re talking about the possibility of death here, right?”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “I know what cholera is, Luke.” Every adult alive knew more about cholera than we’d ever wanted to.

“Then I’m begging you: take your daughter to the hospital. Or let me do it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Luke. We mean to practice what we preach.”

Despite knowing a bit about their beliefs, I would never have guessed that they’d stand on principle at the expense of their only child’s life.

“News flash for you, Kevin: You live in a house. You’re wearing clothes. It’s all technology. If you really want to practice what you preach, shouldn’t you be naked in the woods somewhere?”

“Nobody said we’re perfect,” Kevin said. 

“Does Mira have any say in the matter?” Luke asked.

I thought of how Mira’s eyes had gleamed as she learned about sedimentation and oxidation that day at the plant. I admired her determination not to let her parents’ blinders become her own.

“I’m going to ask you nicely to get off my property and mind your own business.”  

“And I’m going to insist you take your daughter to the hospital. I’ll pay you. How much money do you want?”

Kevin shut the door. Luke banged on it for a couple more minutes, calling out “You coward!” and “You hypocrite!”

Finally, I came out of the shadows. “Come on, Luke. Let Mira get her rest.”

I attended the funeral while Luke stayed behind. He said that if he so much as saw Kevin, he was liable to murder him.

The ceremony was held in Valley of the Temples Memorial Park. The turnout was huge, and there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere, except for my own––I was too upset to cry. Mira’s body was lowered into the ground near the base of the Ko'olau mountains, with a view of Kaneohe Bay. If she’d been ninety years older, it might have been a lovely occasion, but to know she’d died of a disease that ought to have been eradicated from the face of the earth long ago made me seethe. Even as I told Kevin and Ginny how sorry I was, I thought to myself You’re the ones who ought to be apologizing to us, for depriving the world of this bright-eyed girl.

Luke spent the morning mountain-biking to burn off some excess energy. When he got home and asked how the funeral was, I told him it was exactly as heartbreaking as one would expect. “The only good thing,” I added, “is that she got a beautiful plot.”

“Mushroom coffin?”

“Metal, I think.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

“They’re supposed to be all about the planet, right? So they lock their daughter’s body inside a metal box? How’s that supposed to be good? Mira would want a natural burial. She’d want to keep the cycle of nature going.”

I thought of Mira helping in our garden, how excited she’d been to pet an earthworm. But I also saw a nightmare vision of that worm wriggling through her eye sockets, and I felt a terrific urge to protect her from it. Illogical though it might be, I was glad she was in a box, resting peacefully with her body intact.

In bed that night, though, I couldn’t sleep for thoughts of how peacefully I knew Mira wasn’t resting. Even inside that sealed coffin, enzymes were eating cells, microbes feasting on tissues. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the preacher had said at the service, but that hadn’t sat well with me. Mira had never been, and would never be, either of those things. Compost to compost, fertilizer to fertilizer: that was more like it.

As if to confirm the insight, Luke woke with a start and told me about a dream he’d been having in which he’d dug up Mira’s body and buried it in our vegetable garden.

Come morning, we decided we had to get out of the house, so we went surfing. We were both rusty, and the waves were overhead, so we barely talked. Instead, we focused our attention on reading the swells, recovering that language we’d once been so fluent in. For the next however-many hours, those waves took us out of our troubled heads.

Luke was halfway to shore inside a nice, clean barrel when I sensed a sort of shadow passing through the depths beneath me. Instinctively, I drew my legs up onto my board and sat as still as possible. When I heard the splash of something breaching the surface a few feet to my right, I nearly had a heart attack–tiger sharks were common enough in these waters, and they almost always went for lone surfers. When I discovered that my company was in fact a giant sea turtle, I was so relieved that my eyes instantly filled with tears. I wasn’t ready to die. Who ever is?

Once the tears started flowing, they wouldn’t stop.

I turned toward the horizon so that Luke, seated on the beach now, wouldn’t worry as my face contorted and my chest heaved. I had thought I could live vicariously through Mira, but no, she would have to live vicariously through me. It was far from clear what good could grow out of the disgusting waste of her death, but I’d give the rest of my life to making sure it wasn’t nothing–and I’d start by telling Luke I didn’t want to cook anymore; I wanted to go to college and study chemistry. He could accept that or not, I honestly didn’t care.

The waves picked up again. When I was ready, I paddled onto one, got to my feet, and returned to the world.

Author’s Bio

Tom Gammarino writes all manner of things, but has a special love for speculative fiction. Recent stories and essays have appeared in Honolulu Noir, The Hawai'i Review of Books, and Interzone. He teaches Science Fiction, Magical Realism, and Creative Writing at Punahou School, and plays guitar in a progressive rock tribute band called Brainchild. Check out his website at tomgammarino.com and his talented work with the band, Brainchild.

Photo art by Staff