Photo by Jayne Harris on Unsplash
It was a heat-hazy, lazy Saturday morning when the town of Emittsville had its first-ever recorded instance of litter.
It ducked and bobbed on the horizon of the lake, too far out to actually be spotted, and yet its presence was felt by everyone sunbathing or swimming or grilling; an invisible storm cloud that haunted the otherwise postcard-pristine day.
The lake-goers seemed to take turns watching the water, on guard for whatever it was that was out of place.
When the litter finally drifted within view, murmurs of concern rippled through the crowd. Had someone, somewhere across the lake, misplaced this and was currently scurrying around their spot on the far-away shore looking for it? Had someone capsized a ways out there, and this was all of the wreckage that had floated to them? What if this wreckage had the life-saving antidote that the poor boat-wreckee was splashing about looking for?
The hubbub continued on in this manner for a good half hour, before the litter finally drifted within the distance of “someone should do something.” The lifeguard—who was also the town’s only park ranger—waded out to collect the item.
Upon his return, the crowd gathered around him to see for themselves that the item was in fact, a message in a bottle.
It was a perfectly plain bottle, topped with some sort of cork. The only thing of note about it was the slip of paper, rolled up inside.
The lifeguard looked it over, opened it, and gave it two shakes downward.
The note slipped out like a drip of hot sauce. He unrolled the note, and written on the single slice of paper was
I’ve been overthrown by the bees! This stings the most because of you, the bee writing this
He read this out loud, and the gathered crowd didn’t know what to say to it. Finally someone asked, “What does it mean?” Someone from further back in the crowd asked, “What should we do about it?” A third voice rang out somewhere, “Do you think a bee really wrote this?”
The lifeguard turned the note over in his fingers, like he was inspecting a fine slice of silk. He answered, “I don’t know? It’s not signed. It’s not really my responsibility, folks.” He turned the note over once more, before rolling it back up and returning it to the bottle. “I’ll store it in the equipment shed, just in case the owner shows up looking for it.” And while this answered little, it was a suitable response for everyone involved, who dispersed to go back to their respective lake-days.
The next day, three more bottles washed up on the shore, saying things like
Slimfast and Sir-Mix-a-Lot engaged in an eternal war, while the rest of us sit on buns
or
The key to 36D chess is patience. A bozo will think 2D Checkmate is the end of it
and people now brought these to the lifeguard, very confused. The lifeguard was confused too, but promised the lake-goers nothing was amiss, and he stored these notes away in the equipment shed as well.
But the bottles kept coming, and they kept coming in bigger swells. Three, then seven, then seventeen, then forty-four. After just five days, the equipment shed behind the lifeguard stand was full of them. None of them seemed to correspond with one another.
The town of Emittsville called for an emergency town hall to address the influx of messages in bottles.
“What do they mean?” asked one concerned citizen.
“Maybe… maybe it’s an art project?” suggested another.
"I kinda like them," said someone else to no one in particular. "They're fun to read."
The mayor stroked his chin and worked hard to look deep in thought. “I don’t know what it is," he said. "I guess the only thing we can do is keep reading them and see. I’d like to assemble a volunteer task force to read and record each message, and any others that arrive. We’ll have a sign-up at the end of this town hall.”
Those first few days the number of bottles coming in stayed about the same, 75, maybe 100. The volunteer task-force read and recorded each and every message, and the ledger of messages was printed as a special section of the newspaper every Sunday, in chronological order of arrival, because the citizens of the town wanted to stay up to date on them.
Rumors and theories ran rampant. A dread pirate had pilgrimaged across early America and drowned in the lake. A genie actually lived at the bottom of the lake, trapped, and was sending ancient Arabic parables to the surface in hopes someone would come free him. The ghost of Houdini had possessed a paper mill, and was teleporting scraps to this lake, because a jilted lover had lived here years ago.
In the weeks and months that followed, the number of messages consistently surged. The town was going rabid consuming them, and the notes were all anyone would talk about. Book clubs read the notes to each other. The pastor discussed with his congregation what God might’ve thought about the notes. Teachers gave up on subjects and assignments, and willingly gossiped with their students about the notes.
By the time fall was waning, the town was engulfed. There would be no high-school football games that season: the unopened-notes stockpile was stored on the field. More than half the town was wrapped up in some form of collecting, reading and recording the new notes. The rest seemed to orbit the football field, checking back often for the latest updates.
The notes themselves got sillier, more abstract. Some notes were but a single word. Some notes needed immense context of all the prior notes to understand the nuance. It became a source of pride to be on the cutting-edge of the latest notes.
Found the eggs in that showerhead, one student would call out to the other in the hallway.
The bugs unionized, the mailman would wave to old ladies watering their gardens.
I put my pants on like everyone else: throwing my pants in the air mid-handstand the pastor preached to his congregation. Edward Fortyhands with the monkey’s paw the congregation preached back.
The town was so consumed with the notes, they failed to notice the changing of the season. Like a snowbank falling off a roof, winter crept up on them slowly at first, then suddenly. Folks shivered when the first flakes fell, but it was a few weeks before the cold dread of the situation really engulfed them. They had gotten halfway through their football-field-sized stockpile before they realized no new notes were arriving.
Biscuit butter is just bread juice, sorry not sorry the mayor said at the emergency town hall after the first-ever winter freeze. There was a rabid concern around what would become of the notes — and in some sense, themselves — now that the lake had frozen over, and the mayor himself was desperate to improve his public image ever since one note had said found the mayor in the henhouse, wearing his best salamander slippers. No one knew what that meant, but everyone looked at the mayor differently after that, including the mayor.
Hey grandma, can you teach me to rap? asked one of the citizens.
I'd like to buy a creepy mask, but for my knees? suggested another citizen.
The town hall murmured in agreement. Don’t talk to me or my large adult sons ever again rang out in pockets of the room. The mayor brought the ceremonial gavel down on the table, and it was decided.
That evening, immediately after their town hall meeting, the whole town marched to their lake. Little was spoken among the population; such was their focus. They crowded the shores, armed with hammers and mallets and shovels and even the odd pitchfork, and began the grueling task at hand. They took shifts in the gentle lake-surf up to their knees, breaking all the ice that formed too close to shore. The rest of the lake wasn’t their business, but their shore and their bottles were their right, and they knew to protect it at all costs. This way, with their help, the bottles still had somewhere to wash ashore. The messages would still be read; someone would know what they said. Big mood they half-sang, half-chanted, faces glowing an eerie white in the moonlight. Big mood.
Justin Gibson grew up in the Dallas suburbia, but has since transplanted to the D.C. area. He was schooled at Southern Methodist University, which was nice. He currently is employed as a marketing copywriter, but longs to one day mostly garden. This would be his first published fiction — he’s trying to play it cool.