Earth Mother

"I wanted to put it here.  There's more room around the back of the house but I thought it would be kind of weird to have it under their windows.  I don't care but they might."

"No this is the best spot for it.  Since the garden's over the fence you can open the side and pull the tray out and dump it into the compost pile.  You'll need to have at least two, probably three piles."  Meera slid her foot over a square of dirt about the size of the outhouse footprint.

"I went to the hardware store and got the rest of what we needed.  I have some leftover pallet chunks and boards that I can cut up if we need more framing.  Thanks for doing this.  It's weird but I think it will be good for us to have a third bathroom.  We used to have an outhouse at the lake house - my grandma and grandpa's house - when we were growing up.  It was kind of horrible to use but I have mostly fond memories of it now."

Ben walked over to the garage and went inside the house.  He came out with some tools and materials and started stacking them up under the roof of the gazebo.  Cars shuffled down the road outside the fence, but it was otherwise quiet.

Meera picked up her gardening tools and put them into the box she kept in her car.  She folded up the back seats and nestled the box in with her clothes.

They spent the afternoon hauling out the pieces of the outhouse frame they had assembled the weekend before.  When Parker got off work they fit the pieces together and screwed them in place.  "I'd shit here," Ben said, and they all agreed that it was going to work.

Over the next week Meera put in the interior compartments, door, and nailed on the scrap wood they were using for siding.  She painted it green on the outside and white on the inside, and glued a glow-in-the-dark half-moon on the inside of the front door.  They drove out to the green hardware store to find "a short, chunky toilet with the biggest and most affable shit-eating grin you guys have" and found a spiffy model that not only looked like Mr. Sparkle, it was pearlescent pink.

Once the outhouse was finally done they all stood around wondering who'd bite the bullet.  Nobody quite seemed fit to burst and it felt like something you shouldn't go into half assed.  They all agreed to use it the next time they had to break bread, and that was that.  A couple of weeks later, it was second nature and everybody was happy to have a second bathroom (or just to have their first bathroom back).  The next plan was to build a sun shower, but that was a more diffuse and bourgeois need, and caused less of a problem in the early mornings after several cups of coffee.

It was funny now, and practical, to be four people living in a three-bedroom house, with a tenant downstairs and one living in their car.  "It's not the commune I wanted, but it's the one I got," Ben said when they were digging holes in the front yard for planting.  "Maybe we can get some teacup goats, or a flock of micro-chickens.  We can walk them over to the MAX and charge people who work downtown to pet them."

That night went Meera was using the outhouse before bed, she heard an "Oooooo oooo ooooh" kind of noise and promised herself she would get more sleep.  The next morning she passed a knish-sized dollop of stool and heard it again.  "Ooooo ooooh.  Oooooooohohoho.  Thank you!"

Ben was getting ready for work inside the house.  Parker's alarm was going off through his bedroom door.  Meera burst in, making Ben scream in a lilting girlish voice.  He looked at Meera and laughed, but she seemed perturbed.  "What's up?  You need to use the shower?"

"It's nothing," she said, and went back outside and got in her car and drove away.  Meera came back two days later and ate some dinner with everyone in the house.  "Have you guys used the outhouse lately?"  Everybody shook their heads.  She started talking about some changes she thought they could make to the front yard so that the vegetable garden got more sun.

After dinner she snuck out and went back to the outhouse.  She picked up a stick and pried open the door warily.  She knocked some cobwebs off the corners of the ceiling and stepped inside.  With one hand she opened the door and with the other she lifted the toilet lid, in case something needed to run out.  The clamshell cover inside the toilet was up, so she gently stepped on the toilet seat until it parted.  She rapped the stick on the rim of the seat.  Nothing.  She waggled the stick inside, but there was nothing but turd shrapnel and mulch.

"Hello?" she said softly, then turned red and felt foolish.  She slammed the lid down and turned to go.  As she did, she felt her guts squirming and felt an overwhelming urge to splurge.  She pulled down her pants and made gravy.

"Ooooooh."  She looked down between her legs.  "Ooooohoho."  The voice hissed up from the bowl like chocolate velvet.  "Ohoho, you came back," it chortled.  "Thank you, thank you.  Please, more!"  Meera thought she was empty but as the voice spoke her stomach gurgled and she filled the bowl again.  "Oho hoho," the voice came again.

There was a knock on the outhouse door.  "Meera?  Are you okay?"

Meera called out that she was fine and then sat silently for almost an hour, listening to the quiet of the outhouse and the cars crawling by on the street outside the fence.

The next day she drove out past downtown and headed west.  She was going to go for a hike in the forest but decided to keep driving and ended up at the beach.  She stood looking at the haystacks and made lines in the sand with the toe of her shoe.  She slept in the back of her car with her sheets pulled over her head until they turned translucent with the dawn light and the whole town started to wake up.  A dune buggy revved its engine across the parking lot.  She swatted the noise away like a fly but she was awake now and crawled up front and started home.

Meera thought about staying with her family for a couple of days but decided against it.  She felt a little crazy but was used to the feeling and wanted to garden and read in the gazebo.  She'd use the inside bathroom while everyone was out and if it got too crowded she'd go to the library down the road.  She needed some new books anyway.

When she got back home she walked inside and then out again.  She picked up a rock and went into the outhouse.  She put the rock on the lid and stood inside the closed door listening.  She moved the rock and opened the lid and then put it back down and set the rock on top and walked to the library.

She couldn't focus to read the titles on the books in the library.  She kept remembering that she had a book under the front seat of her car.  Halfway home she told herself to stop pretending.  She didn't care about books.

"Ooohoho," the voice came from between her legs.  "Thank you, Meera.  Thank you!"

"You know my name?"

"They say it often.  They talk about the garden and how well you do it.  They talk about my house and how it happened, it really happened."

"Do you talk to them?" she asked, but it just chortled.

"What do you eat?" it asked in a serious tone, like it wanted to understand what it was.

Meera told it that she had eaten some greens from the garden and a rotisserie chicken leg out of the fridge, and the food she had eaten on the way to the beach, and then explained how a composting toilet worked.  You are alive, she said, which was always somewhat true with a composting toilet, but she didn't or couldn't explain the real difference.

It asked her to take it out with her, around the city.  She said no at first but then got a yogurt tub and fished out some turdlets with a garden spade and twisted the tub up into a bread bag and tied it to her bike handles.  They biked out to the waterfront on the north side of the city and sat by the river watching planes take off.  It seemed a little cowed by the whole experience so it sat quietly and listened while she told it about contemporary social issues.  It cooed and murmured and after an hour or two asked to go home.  "I'm drying out," it explained.

For the next couple of days, Meera visited the toilet twice a day, whether she had to go or not.  She was working odd jobs and sometimes had to drive back and forth with the traffic, but she always went out of her way to visit.  She asked everyone in the house to not use the outhouse, which they mostly didn't anyways so it was not a thing.

One night she brought her blanket out of the car and curled up next to the bowl with the lid up and her pillow resting on the seat.  All night she smelled sweet straw and earth and - to be honest - the occasional nose-curling puff of sewage.  It was like cuddling with someone you loved who might also benefit from a shower, and it felt like nothing she hadn't done before.

The next morning Ben came out of the house and knocked on the car window.  He peered inside and saw nothing, and then went to the outhouse and knocked.  The door was locked.  He stuck a thin piece of metal into the door and lifted the latch.  When the door swung open Meera was there, curled up.  She opened her eyes and blinked, and then smiled and went back to sleep.

They had a house meeting a few days later and offered for Meera to sleep on the couch inside.  At the least she could use the cot in the garage or next to the laundry machines, which wouldn't much bother the tenant in the basement.  She said it was sweet but she liked where she was.  They wanted to tell her not to sleep in the outhouse again, but they couldn't say why it should matter to them.

It had been a couple of months since the outhouse went up, and the bin was getting full.  Meera set her phone to go off at 2AM.  When she got up the whole night was quiet.  She could hear someone rustling through a recycling bin streets away.  She opened the outhouse door and pulled out the tray under the toilet.  It was heavier than she thought and it hit the cement with a clunk when she pulled it down the step.  "Meera," it lilted, but she shushed it librarianly.  It whispered, "Where are you taking me?"

She opened her mouth to say that they were just going around the fence to the compost piles, but then she wasn't sure.  She had been thinking that it would be nice to have it in the garden while she worked.  She would spread it around her kale and beans.  They could work together under the sun, doing their part to make new life.  But then she thought about her housemates, and the neighborhood dogs, and she imagined eating a garden-fresh cucumber and hearing it scream inside her head.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked.  She had told it about the car, the beach, the mountains, the desert.  She told it about things that reminded her of it.  The forest floor, the river delta, the amphibious slough bottoms.

"Let's go to the riverside and watch planes take off," it whispered just as she was remembering that day with the yogurt tub.  She went into the house through the back door and got a garbage bag, dumped the tray inside, and made some space in the front seat of her car.

They drove over to the marina near the airport.  Meera picked up an old parking pass from the ground and stuck it in her window.  It was too early for anyone to care.  She coiled a sheet on the ground and wrapped the bag in it.  She dragged and carried it through the half-full parking lot, over the curb, and next to a bush rising out of the thickets of grass on the riverbank.  There weren't any planes taking off yet, but she uncovered the bag and opened it to let the cool morning air in.

"Oooh.  Oooooooh," it sighed.  "Thank you, Meera.  You are so good to me."

They sat staring out over the river and laying back to look at the sky.  The edges of the sky started to lighten, and the occasional bike zipped by on the trail behind.  People started up their boats and headed out to fish.  A white and black car pulled into the marina, inching slowly along, shining a light on the windows of the parked cars.

"We can't -" they both said at once.  Meera turned to look at it.  She touched the patch of straw and earth that most reminded her of a face, and realized why it knew her so well.  It was her, a part of her, and it was of her.

She pulled down the edge of the bag and tipped it into the bush.  "How do I say goodbye to you?" she asked, but in response her stomach burbled.  "I'm not ashamed," she answered, and squatted over it.  She grunted and held onto the bush.  When she was done, it glistened beautifully in the morning light.  She covered the heap with grass and took the bag back to the parking lot.  She wanted to go back but she thought if she did she would never go back home.  She would sit there until she collapsed and turned to earth, and together they'd slowly dry out and sink into the river.  She craved it, but it was not time.

A week later she came back and stood by the hummock next to the bush.  She said hello but there was no answer.  As she looked out over the water a plane flew overhead, and in its wake she could make out the almost-inaudible chortling of the river.