Dirt
Do you ever wonder what dirt might look like under the microscope? I like to picture each one of dirt as a tiny charcoal grey orb. Not a perfect sphere, but a polyhedron with each side bowing in the middle. Its sides are reflective, but not polished, like tarnished metal. It looks like a steelpan turned inside out. I stare out of my curved back window into the dirt pools of my garden. A new trend has taken root recently: people have been decorating the top of their dirt with colourful plants. It sounded like a good idea, so I got in on the action.
Now I have a thicket of sunflowers and gladioli joining their stems together like fusing rat tails. The plants have slurped down their unlimited refills of soil, leaving fifteen feet of nothing between the edge of my weathered concrete paths and the surface of the cushiony brown loam. Sometimes, when I try to sleep, I think I can hear the flowers’ roots taking a midnight feast. It sounds like the softest shovelling. When I wake in the night and look out of my bedroom window, I find the faces of the sunflowers turned towards me, like they’re staring, scowling. We’re not sure what’s below the dirt, but letters from the county written in red ink warn that we don’t want to find out. I check the clock on the wall. It reads, “Twenty-four minutes past three” in cursive. That’s still plenty of time to get to the dirt shop before work.
I enter my clothing room, and my eyes sweep over my suits like a kid running a stick along a wooden fence. There’s the work suit, the park suit, the gym suit, the court suit, and at the end, the digging suit. It’s a hazmat get-up made out of green tent material. I flush out the bottom of the hood and put it on. In the interior of the hood, there’s a screen that lets me see out, and on the front of the hood, a low-resolution LCD screen displays a pixelated version of my face, although the bloom is a little high.
I step into my front yard like Aldrin stepping onto the Moon. I can see the soap low in the sky, surrounded by tendrils of pink and purple. There’s a wall in front of my house, and I’m not sure how to get around it. I feel my way along it, grainy bricks beneath my fingers. Eventually, I work out that part of the wall is made of wood and attached to two hinges. I push on it, no dice. I pull on it, and it swings aside. As usual for this time of night, there is a procession of foxes heading down the street, returning to their burrows. I manage to get ahold of one, and it squeals and growls, a pained atavism. I hold the fox’s mouth shut and wrestle a harness onto it, fraying ropes trailing from the harness to my wheelbarrow. I climb inside the barrow’s rusted hammock and we’re away.
Twenty minutes later, I arrive outside of Purchaseable Dirt, a log cabin with an overactive pituitary gland. It’s joined at the hip to its rival store, Professor Suds’s Sanitation Emporium. The Emporium is eerily clean, blinding white like a bleached smile, tiled like a bathroom inside and out. I’d rather have the dirt store any day. Underneath Purchaseable Dirt’s main sign is a blank plank: the future home of a store motto that they’ve been deciding on since they opened. I climb the ladder to the store, every rung night cold, tubes squeaking under my gloves. Of course, we need to go through a presentation before we can enter. An employee in a ghillie suit speaks in an inhuman rasp. He tells us that all dirt is composed of “Stuff”. On the aged PowerPoint next to him, sofas, hair brushes, and entire cities break down into fine black particulate.
Outside the PowerPoint pod, I find a polite little trolley train. It’s waiting for me to whisk one of its vertebrae away. The trolleys are a vast improvement on the store’s previous policy of forcing you to strap all your purchases to your body. The last time I visited, I looked like a mother possum carrying her babies. When I approach the trolley at the back of the queue, there is the sound of something inside it unclasping. A shallow plastic receptacle extends from the handlebar, one that’s larger than the bar itself. Inside the tray, on fortune cookie paper, there is a message: “Leave a deposit”. I dive into my pocket and my fingers filter through old bobby pins and Phillips Head Screws before landing on a coin. It’s a blue one with the CoinCorp dog on the front. I check its expiry, it’s still in date. I drop it into the tray which greedily snaps back into the trolley.
A second later, the trolley replies with a new fortune: “Not enough value. People leave coins behind, trolleys behind. What do you really value?”. I go pocket spelunking again, this time on the other side. I climb back out with a photo of me and my Dorotha attending her first counting bee. In the photo, my eyes glisten with pride. I gingerly place the picture into the tray. The receptacle shuts and stays shut, the tail of the cart disconnecting from the trolley in front and lolling into the body of the cage. I think of all the robots that were killed to make the trolley.
Walking down an aisle, I can imagine getting married to all the products. The cracking dried mud below my boots is lit by fluorescent tubes the length of oak trees. My tread stamps the imprint of my boot into the floor, leaving new peaks for the light to bounce off of. I think the distant walls might be made of assorted bug nests. The dirt is stored in little houses, just like I am. They have big, curved glass windows at the back just like mine does. They also have a door that when yanked ever so gently, can start a landslide of dirt into a brown paper bag below. I marvel at all the types of dirt the store has on offer: garage dirt, building site dirt, fun dirt, sawdust, cool dirt, magnetic dirt, dandruff, but none of this is my dirt, the brown dirt that plants eat.
I’m intimidated by the inconsiderate presence of one of the Commerce Abundants at the end of the aisle. I need information, but the Commerce Abundants hold their knowledge notoriously close to their chest, and with good reason. It is why we keep them around. This Abundant wears the standard uniform: a tiny pair of black pez nez, microscopes through which to analyse every pore of his customers, and a burlap apron with the words “Pound Dirt” across it. There’s a lump in his front pocket, and he has a split beard like a salt and pepper waterfall. I approach at a 45-degree angle.
“Excuse me, sir”, I say. I assume he looks at me. “You’ve got so many great dirts here and I love them all, but do you have the dirt of the forest?”.
Get Gamer_152’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“Hey, Carla!”, the man calls into the thicket of aisles. A purple-haired woman arrives with a pricing gun. She is wearing the same uniform as the guy, but her apron says, “Dirty-minded”. Her nose is running. “Get a load of mole boy over here! He’s speaking like a newscaster”, says the first Abundant. Carla places the pricing gun in her apron like she’s holstering a pistol.
“What’s your fuckin’ problem?”, Carla asks. “You here to waste our time?”.
“Not at all. I just need a little soil”, I say.
“And how is that our problem?”, the male Abundant asks. I realise I’ll have to change my tack. Maybe if I just apply a little pressure.
“Well, the soil level in my garden is very low right now and I don’t know what will happen if it runs out, you probably do, but-”.
Carla and the man look at each other like they’ve both just realised they left their ovens on. “Follow me”, Carla says in a curt tone.
Within mere hours, I’m in a section of the store with a banner over it reading “Soil: A plant’s home today, your home tomorrow”. It smells like fresh rain, and there’s a shed next to each dirt house with “Nutrents” printed on it. Tubes like hamster tunnels connect each nutrient box to one of the houses. I can see seltzer water flowing through the tunnels towards the houses, and suspended in the water, chicken legs, broccoli heads, and orange slices. The soil eats better than I do. There are also rows of soil houses with blooms growing out of the chimney, lined up like they’re awaiting inspection.
I search the aisles looking for the dirt that’s the same colour as the one in my garden: chestnut void. I pass a cafe where more Abundants are shovelling herbs into the mouths of hungry patrons. Up against a honeycomb wall, I see a dirt that looks like the one in my pools, a dirt that looks like desire, a dirt that looks like home. As I push the trolley, the child’s seat keeps falling open, ruining the moment. It’s distractingly red and interrupts the perfect cuboid shape of the trolley. As my frustration boils over, I remember the bobby pin in my pocket. I could use it to clamp the top bar of the seat to the wireframe of the buggy. Ingenious.
I dip my hand back into the cave on one side of the suit and feel for the pin when my trolley collides with a shelf of dirt houses. A fizzy clang reverberates through my arms and ears. The soil pours out of the broken houses, and I see a crack climbing the wall behind them. A noise like an air raid siren blares through the air, steel shutters close over the doors like eyes being lidded. Abundants flock to the crack like moths to my bathroom light, and I can see bubbles floating into the Purchaseable Dirt. Bubbles? That’s right, there’s the sanitation emporium on the other side. What happens next is like being punched in the head by an ocean. The dam breaks, and pearlescent blue fluid invades the aisles. It pushes my head underwater, makes me spin head over ass like an armadillo. Mercifully, I seem to be falling asleep. Fatally, I seem to be falling asleep.
I come to without wanting to, and despite the employees of the Purchaseable Dirt scrambling around me, it takes me a moment to realise I’m not in my bedroom anymore. Before my eyes, filth and clean fizz and spark as they react with each other. I get to my feet, and at first, I panic. I must be wanted in six aisles for a colossal fuck-up like this, but then, suddenly, the world snaps into focus. Maybe it was just the head injury shutting down the fear centre of my brain, but I felt like I was right where I needed to be.
The Abundants are dragging long retractable hoses to the cleanup, and I am invisible to them. I take my chance to load a truck’s worth of splintered soil boxes into my trolley. Then, I hold some of the paper bags under the brown avalanches. I push the trolley of dirt towards the front doors, but I can’t feel my limbs. I feel like I’m floating. I reach one of the tills at the front of the store, but it doesn’t have any buttons. I see a lanyard dangling from underneath it. I pull on it, and on the other end, there’s a lead pendant in the shape of a watering can: an NFC key. I pick it up, push the cart over to the door and hold the can against it. The shutter rises like the sun.
I take the day off work to shovel soil into the pits like I’m filling graves, gaining safety one spoonful at a time. I wake up that night to the same sound of hungry greens devouring soil, and am dragged down by the grating familiarity of insomnia. I part the curtains with one hand, look out of the window, but there are no condemning stares this time. The trunks of each plant bend toward the ground, their petals facing their roots. They’re bowing.
