THE FILTH GODDESS

FICTION

Trigger Warning: Trichotillomania, Suicide

Devin Thomas O’Shea

When I lost teeth as a kid, the filth goddess let herself in through the front door at midnight. She’d borrow my dad’s tools to get under the sink, wrench open the tap, and shotgun the sludge that had accumulated in the pipes down there. Half racoon, half woman, what caught in the drains of the showers was a delicacy to her. I snuck out of bed to watch from the hallway, noticing that crumbs and cobwebs from under the sink became magnetized to her clothes and fur. She came dangerously close to me, opened the door to the basement, and shuffled down the old wooden stairs to clean the lint traps of the dryer. Just another day on the job for her, but I peeked from the top of the steps, looking down at the trapezoids of light cast by the laundry room’s single bulb.

You could hear the dryer door slam closed all over the house, and I retreated back down the hallway to my room. I locked myself inside with the light off as her stomping up the stairs got louder. My parents slept upstairs and didn’t hear a thing.

The filth goddess barged in and flicked the Thomas the Tank Engine lightswitch I’d grown too old for. She was eating an old scouring sponge.

“That’s the sponge we keep below the sink,” I pointed out. “We’re still using that.” I sat cross-legged and pulled the blankets around me like a monk—protection against her flies.

“Someone decided it was garbage,” she said. As she spoke, larvae birthed to quick-winged black things at the back of her throat with every word. She belched them out into my room, and they began to swarm, blotting out the light. Dust and dander rose from the carpet—slow at

first, then fast, attaching to her slacks and boots as if magnetized. The filth goddess had lavender skin with black and white zebra fur. She wore a canvas chef’s apron tied around her waist, and her swarms of buzzing flies blurred the contours of her figure as she stood with hands on hips, taking a look around the room like an older sister back from college, sponge between her fingers like a snack donut.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Tooth.” She enjoyed the last bite while looking over my shelf of Star Wars Legos, my proudest shelf. Licking her mauve fingers clean, she said, “okay. Heads up, chief,” and headed for the pillow, which I’d given some distance, suspecting that’s what she came to take care of.

I froze at the other end of the bed as she rummaged through my sheets and blankets. Her eyes were cavernous pits without eyeballs, just impressions in the skull covered by a green moss that also painted her brow, cheeks, and whiskers. Maggots moved about her collar, bugs crawled into her ears, and that sharp smell was formaldehyde, but I didn’t know what that was at the time.

“I dare you to block the path of a fairy,” my grandfather had told me when I was very young. He and my grandmother had held onto the Irish lore. “If you want a rash of worms to come flying out of your nose, get in the way of a puck. I dare you. They’ll vanish your pecker at the snap of a finger, with a curse on the family bloodline,”—a man of his generation, he was a little fixated on the gender/castration element—“or she’ll fill the floor beneath your feet with termites, and everything around you will crumble like sand, sucking you down into the earth forever. Shit!” he’d say, and we’d laugh, and he’d pinch the sleeves of my shirt, throwing my hands up to wiggle six-year-old fingers and I’d jump up and run around the backyard to escape the pull down into Hades.

The filth goddess found her treasure and shook my baby teeth in her palm. “That it? Just two?”

“Yeah…” I said, and risked putting my hand outside the covers to push on my other teeth, which didn’t have the itch; that discomfort in the gums that made it feel good to press on the tooth, and wiggle it, and let it come dislodged from the skin with the taste of copper. “That’s it for a while,” I said. The horseflies were everywhere now, crawling all over the sheets. “Two is a lot.”

The filth goddess shrugged and headed for the door. As she walked down the hall, I felt her chew my teeth with her own teeth, cracking and grinding as if those parts of my body were still, a little bit, me.

I should have never gone after her, but kids at school had gotten to me. I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall.

“What about my dollar?!”

Grandma’s old stories said it’s you who should give thanks to the filth goddess, not the other way around. She is the cleanser of the primeval forest; she is a sin-eater; a child of Vishnu who consumes what’s not useful to the flourishing of life, clearing the way for the Brahman. I followed her down the hall and out into the living room. There were many of the filth goddess’s clones tending the earth all at once, but they all shared one mind. She looked back at me from the front door standing on an astral plane, viewing all of time at once, with the intensity of a wild fox leaving the hen coop. Cross the filth goddess and she was known for rearranging faces—eyes on chin, mouth on forehead—Picasso shit. “I don’t work for you,” she said.

“I guess… I don’t care about the dollar. Can I ask you some questions?”

“Nope,” she said, touching the door, and became gone; vanished in a space-time hiccup.

I was relieved that the flies went with her—all except one, which stayed and buzzed around my room, biting my neck all night.

p

I was fifteen when we buried my grandfather at Calgary Cemetery. It was a hot Missouri morning, and though they’d taken me out of school, I had to work later that day at the deli. It was April, and almost summer. He was one of the most important people in my life, and now he was dead to prostate cancer as all the dogwood trees began to bloom. I remember I was sweating in my suit in the limousine because it was really hot out that day. All my aunts and uncles talked about was the humidity versus the heat. My cousins kept quiet and away from me. Most of them lived out of town and didn’t grow up with the benefit of Grandpa and Grandma as babysitters, support parents, and Sunday dinner guests.

I caught her later on that day in the alley behind the South City deli, up in the dumpster, diving around. It’s hard to even say “she” is a she; I’m just going off how the Aztecs phrased it. Fairies don’t really have a gender, but appear in the figure you need to see them mixed with their own will; it’s a bent-light kind of trick. It’d be a measurable property if the gods wanted to be measured, but Tlazōlteōtl—that’s the Aztec name—has always appeared as a she. My Guatemalan mother studied gods as a profession; all kinds of gods. She was an anthropology professor at the local Midwest college and wore a lot of poncho shawls.

“Finished digging up graves?” I asked the filth goddess in the dumpers. I was weighed down with bags of lunch-rush trash in each hand. She ignored me.

“I was there today,” I said. “At the graveyard. Calgary. I saw you digging.”

“Okay,” the filth goddess said flatly. She was rooting around through half-eaten pastrami sandwiches. Between finger and thumb, she picked up a piece of greased paper, and stuffed it in her mouth like a slice of salami.

Everything at the deli was so greasy; the trays were slick even if you washed them over and over with soap and hot water. It had been that way when Grandpa and I stopped in for a sandwich after church on Sundays; it remained that way until I was the one behind the counter, behind the greasy slicer, washing the plastic trays of the pastrami oil, mopping the rubber mats the sandwich-makers slipped on. If you weren’t careful, the slicer would take a thumb, but I liked the job, and I liked that I was old enough to have a job. I’d grown out of so much, including the time spent at my grandparent’s house. When Grandpa was sick, I stayed away because I was scared.

Anyway, the dumpster was caked in grease, which made the opossums love it, and the filth goddess was the queen of opossums. The little bandits crawled out of the sewers at night, and if you didn’t lock up the lids, they’d trash the alley in the same way the filth goddess was doing now.

“They buried my grandfather out there,” I said, wanting to offer her something. Flies began blotting out the sun the closer I got to her. She was a deity after all, and us humans have always known our place. It’s our duty to offer gifts to the gods.

“I guess you can have his body,” I said. I wasn’t ready to know deep down that whatever “he” was, was gone. The body at the funeral in the coffin was not a wax replica; that was him, devoid of life. Grandpa was not somewhere else, his mind was an aspect of his body, and now his mind was dead, his body inanimate.

“He’s not using it anymore,” I said. “Or… it already belongs to you. I guess.”

Her black hair was matted down with sweat and garbage juice. “Not filth,” she muttered.

We’d thrown a broken tray out a few days ago, and she used it as a shovel to dig around. Her sleeves were rolled up, cotton smock covered in stains, flies like a storm cloud overhead. Everything crawled around the filth goddess—it felt like the dead cells of my skin seemed to peel themselves towards her, the un-shit waste inside my guts aching in her direction. I know that’s gross, but that’s how it felt.

“How is he not?” I asked. “He’s dead. He doesn’t need his body anymore. He’s over that.”

She peered over the edge of the dumpster to get a look at me, then went back to rummaging. “Has use,” she grunted. Her gaze drained the color from my vision. “The stone,” she said. “The stone matures. The one above the head. It’s useful. You’re using it. Not waste.”

“The headstone?” I was talking too much and should have known better; there’s only four or five humans in history who have ever convinced a god to explain something to them, and sometimes that’s a curseable offense. The more you talk to something as powerful as the filth goddess, the more likely you are to bind yourself in some contract for your firstborn or enter an impossible riddle contest for your soul—every word is a possible trap for something fucked-up that the gods will think is funny.

So I walked away. I went to throw my trash bags in the other dumpsters, but she snapped at me: “No! Bring those. Here.” She leaned over the side with her purple hand outstretched, coarse fur on her arm. Her mauve lips were wrinkled. “Give to me. Okay. Good. Yes.”

I handed the bags up, and she pulled them into her dumpster, emptying them carefully. Another disgusting part: I got close enough that she made my zits pop. I was going through puberty, and the deli grease made it 100% worse.

“How do you know when a body’s ready?” I asked, wiping my nose with a clean dish towel I kept in my back pocket.

“The name,” she said, clawing through the afternoon’s trash. “No one remembers the name. Then, no one remembers the body. If no one remembers the name, good to go. Someone remembers? Body needs more years. More years to forget. Takes up space in the graveyard, but then graveyard goes to meadow.”

I took high school English, and tried to show it off to her—I was fifteen. “A memento mori?” I said.

She stopped digging and her head craned up at the sun as if something important had just been written in the clear blue sky. I think the Latin upset her. She snapped out of it, looked down on me, surprised I was paying attention; “What do you want?!” she screeched. “Get outta here! I’m busy!”

So, I went back inside,locked the door, and went back to work, slightly relieved that my grandfather was still real, unconsumed by the void of the filth goddess’ stomach. He was a body below a stone still being used by every aunt, uncle, cousin,every buddy from the war, his fellow managers at the furniture emporium. He wasn’t yet devoured by Tlazōlteōtl, because we, the living, still remembered.

p

I tried to give her things throughout the years—love letters from exgirlfriends, my diploma because I hated what I studied (Business Administration), old books that weren’t coughing out the answers anymore. But the filth goddess never appeared. Even if I didn’t want to use them, I was still using them, you know?

In Chicago, I went through a pretty dark period when I considered depriving my body of oxygen using a rope, passing through the veil and into the filth goddess’ arms.

One night, lying in bed, staring at the ice blue ceiling of my cramped studio apartment in Rogers Park, I wondered if the ceiling fan would hold my weight. Then I began to practice how I would explain the rope to the checkout girl at the hardware store one block over.

“I’m making a tire swing for my nephew.” She wouldn’t care. Maybe I could just cut her off at the pass and say, “Haha, me? No-o-o. I’d never use this to hang myself from the ceiling fan in my apartment.”

A few days after those thoughts came, and went, and came again to drill at the core of my being until I couldn’t stand it anymore, I woke up from a bad dream. It was 2:30 a.m. and I was wide awake. It was Sunday. I’d been drunk all day Saturday, and now I was hyper-awake and alarmingly depressed. My heart raced. I had to get out of bed and move around,

Shoes on, coat on, down the stairs to the sidewalk outside my building. I discovered it had rained. The streets were slick and bright with the orange street lamps, and the post office’s exterior lights blazed ice blue. My mind moved quickly and clumsily, ping-ponging between an all-encompassing rage at myself, loathing, and fear of what I’d do. So I started walking.

As I made my way north in the humid night, I permitted a nervous habit: plucking at my beard hairs. I pulled individual strands of the beard out one by one; I did it all the time in those days. While watching TV, reading, writing, thinking, working, listening, worrying. The hard thick hairs felt the best. They were big and wiry, itchy in the skin the same way a first tooth is itchy. Yanking them out felt like relief. If I could yank the end of an impacted cuticle, there would be pus and a little blood at the end: repulsive, but the relief was pure bliss. It was like removing a splinter you didn’t know was there, realizing you’d been tolerating a great pain as normal for a very long time.

My thoughts lit out toward doom. A deep part of me felt that the world was ending, and that I would have to witness the death of everything, and I plucked another hair from my cheek and cast it into the nighttime grass of the front yards in the neighborhood in which I hiked. My grandfather and I used to go on walks. That’s what he always wanted to do. He would drive over and give my mom a break from parenting so she could finish her thesis, and he and I would walk around my neighborhood, or drive over and walk the looping lanes of his, or we would drive somewhere nice, to rows of Victorian mansions where I think he had wanted to live if he’d had more money. I would chase the rabbits across the lawns, and then we’d stop at a good bench. There was a white stone one at the top of my hill, on the corner of Del Norte Avenue where we would sit quietly, and Grandpa would ask me simple things, and I would show him an interesting leaf.

No one was awake in Rogers Park, but I didn’t look good: my beard had become scraggly, balding in places, and my hair was long and

crazed. To make it worse, I hopped the fence at Calgary—another Calgary, a different cemetery from the one my grandfather was buried in, and where my grandmother would be soon.

Do all midwestern cities have a Calgary Cemetery? I wondered, pinning up my hair in a ponytail so as not to scare anyone.

I was far from home in Chicago, walking the gravel path toward the lake, and I chided myself for complaining too much when I spoke to my friends about my depressive thoughts. I felt I bummed my parents out with my view of the world. I had decided a while ago that I would talk to them less about these things—so as to bum them out less—and so deeper into the hole I went.

It was humid and foggy—an early summer night. I passed the cenotaphs and noticed that the L line on the western side of the cemetery was quiet; the trains stopped at 1 a.m. There were stars overhead, but I didn’t look up for fear of tripping over a stone. I rounded a path and surprised a pair of skunks, fat ones nosing around the gravel. They turned on a dime and waddled off into the bushes beside a mausoleum, frightening me as much as I scared them. My heart beat like a drum in my rib cage and my vision seemed to shimmer with unreality.

She was digging near the eastern fence, near the boulevard that separated the cemetery from the lake.

“They’ve been forgotten?” I said, panting in the moonlight, hiking in the grass.

The filth goddess gave me the side-eye as I approached. She plied the earth with a spade shovel. The stone she was working at was so eroded and carpeted with moss that I couldn’t read the name.

“If I die,” I said, not wanting to get so close but stumbling, “you won’t come to get me for a while because people will remember, right?”

She plunged the spade back into the rain-wet soil, booted it down, and wrenched a fresh slab of clay from the earth to throw at my feet, freezing me in place. It was dark, and I noticed the flies less, but they were there.

“I don’t know what to do.” I was bleary, still half drunk and now a little terrified.

The goddess spat in the dirt and kept digging.

“My grandmother can’t remember anything anymore,” I said. “She doesn’t know who I am anymore.” No response. What did she

care? I don’t know, I thought maybe she would know the gods of memory or something. Maybe she could talk to someone in the fifth dimension for me.

“Can I stay?” I asked. “I just need to stay here for a while. Do you want someone to talk to?”

Cavernous green-lichen eye sockets, purple cheeks sagging like old eggplant skin, dotted with whiskers—the filth goddess kept digging, obviously annoyed I was there but tuned in to some other radio frequency that was much more interesting than the one I occupied.

“Before she couldn’t remember anything, grandma told me something about you,” I said, going for it. “She said you owe her one. You owe her something. She said she met you when she was a little girl. Margaret O’Sullivan. Detroit, Michigan, 1930-something. Do you remember that name?”

The filth goddess stopped and leaned on the shovel, looking at me like an annoyed car mechanic. “I don’t work for you,” she muttered.

“She was very poor. She said she met you some winter day, and you gave her a word. She told me the word, and I need to use it,” I said, out of options, wishing I could have held onto the promise longer, maybe passed it on to my children. But I spoke the word my grandma uttered one bright afternoon, as she lay there remembering the past on her hospice bed; it was a long word I didn’t understand.

The filth goddess shook her head and said, “No deals like that anymore. Not since the plastics.”

“Deals expire?” I asked. “Like coupons?”

“Yes,” the filth goddess said, but produced a long pair of golden scissors from her smock. “Here.” She flung them into a tombstone with a loud plank, and they fell into the grass beside me.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and touched her chin thoughtfully.

I picked up the scissors and her flies swarmed about my wrists. The blood in my arms grew solid, my hands grew stiff, and they were purple for days after touching the metal.

I felt at my beard. The waves of Lake Michigan crashed on the rocks. “Can I give you my hair?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, belching out new flies and gnats. “I’ll take a finger if you don’t need it anymore.”

“Do I have to give you a finger?” I asked.

The filth goddess shook her head like, What a moron. What the fuck is this guy’s problem? “It’s your sacrament,” she said, and went back to work.

I sat on the headstone of a thing once named Bryan, and bit by bit, I pulled parts of my beard out, and sliced them off as short as I could. The pieces of my hair came off like downy balls of wool tumbling into the moonlit grass. I cut my ponytail off with one slice. Carefully around the back of my neck, I cut, and cut, and felt better. There was a puddle nearby, and I used its glossy stillness to see my reflection. I used one blade to shave my face and head. It took an hour, but the darkness attained a benevolent quality, and I felt the wind behind my ears, and listened to the Lake Michigan white caps meet the cement boulders and spray the night air.

“Here,” I said when I was done, and I gathered the hair up. I placed it close to the edge of the grave, on some grass so it wouldn’t get muddy.

She was down to her shoulders now, nearly six feet, and popped up to grab my offering. She ate it without paying much attention, like a candy bar consumed while stressed. My lungs felt cleaner, my head felt light, but I became exhausted. “I don’t want to see my parents get old and die,” I said because the words came up and they felt right. It was as though she’d eaten my stresses and uncorked a dam. The words poured out.

“I don’t want to watch the planet heat up. What if I have to watch the forests burn? What if I have to witness all the birds drop out of the sky?” I looked up at the void between the stars overhead, and felt the toil we all labor under, the debt, the lightless future—it all left through my lungs, and I was happy to be alive in the now, in the moon-blue grass, with the black iron fence, and the empty road, and the rocks breaking up the lake waves, eroding small bits of themselves away.

“I don’t want to have to see it,” I said, staring up at the stars so long my neck became sore, listening to her dig in the black mud, ignoring me. “I don’t want to watch everything decay and die.”

Her shovel hit a coffin lid; she stopped and caught her breath. “Hey. You. What are you still doing here?” she said. “Go. Go on.”

I became un-transfixed by the sky, blinked, rubbed my eyes. I said, “Thank you.”

Lifting the coffin lid, browsing the contents like a charcuterie board, she said, “I do not work for you.”

I climbed back over the cemetery wall and walked south through the neighborhoods with Beckett’s chant in my head: you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

I kept walking those Chicago neighborhoods as the sun began to color the sky between the buildings pink, and people appeared to take the garbage away, and the shops opened, and the trains began to carry people between night and day shifts. I walked along the lake, somehow allowing myself to feel the feelings I had kept bottled up inside: grief, despair. I got back to my apartment at 7 a.m. and laid down on my futon. I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was all still there, but less so.