It has come to this:
Posting on reddit about a phenomenon not covered by the mainstream media.
I tried.
“I’m sorry, but we’re not that kind of news source,” they said. “Perhaps the National Enquirer.”
“I have evidence,” I said.
“I’m sure. Bye.”
Not one newspaper or website would hear me out. No one asked to see the photos and videos.
So read it here first—
Our organic waste has come alive!
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s, composting was a fringe activity, and organic waste usually went into the garbage. My town didn’t start advertising composting as an option until the late 1990s, when suddenly they started giving away composters.
You know the ones I mean: the big black ones.
We should have clued in. When’s the last time the government gave anything away? But we didn’t, instead piling decomposing matter onto decomposing matter in our composters, thinking we were doing the planet a favour.
Perhaps we were.
But there’s a difference between the planet and humanity, and it’s humanity who’ll pay for this.
I saw my first Compost Man in March.
Holding my bucket of waste, I lifted the composter lid—and there they were: a pair of spheroid eggshell eyes staring menacingly at me! Through a dense cloud of flies!
I threw the waste down, grabbed a shovel and started stabbing the half-formed soil within, but to no avail.
They are not solid as we are.
Not as weak.
The blade penetrated the compost but the Compost Man remained alive, its crushed eyes reforming, and its fly companions buzzing with mocking laughter.
I reported this immediately to the police.
No one investigated.
Behind my back, they started calling me an old fool.
Soon after, animals began to disappear: roaming cats that had left home and never come back; small dogs, then larger ones; and livestock in the form of chickens, sheep and goats.
Always explanations followed.
Coyotes got the cats. Hawks picked off the small dogs. Someone stole the larger ones. As for the sheep and goats, they were got by wolves.
It’s been a century since there’s been wolves around here. Yet they’ll believe in their return before they’ll believe in Compost Men!
They only stopped calling me a fool when the first child disappeared.
Amber alert.
Followed by a police search, all resulting in nothing of course.
The police even talked to me, treating me as if I was the one who had done it. I told them they were freer than air to check my property, but they’d be better off checking the composters.
I suppose they didn’t listen.
A week later someone reported human teeth and bones in the soil they’d spread in their garden.
This is not a shock.
After all, we are as organic as a banana squash. You can bet your life the Compost Men will break us down and use us as raw materials for their nefarious ends.
I started gathering evidence after that.
Filming not only my own composters, but those belonging to others, documenting the wickedness within. An evil, alien sentience containing cat hair and dog tags and goat hooves.
More children disappeared.
Until the police decided there must be a serial kidnapper in town.
Parents kept their children home after that.
But more still went missing.
“She was in the yard,” they’d say. “I barely took my eye off her.”
They should have asked:
“Well, what else is in your yard, ma’am?”
Composters.
They rove now—some of them: at night—ones who’ve grown stronger, consumed more of us, I reckon; like snails with black plastic shells, crawling up and down the street, from darkness to darkness between the streetlight halos.
There’s even a beauty to it in the midnight silence.
Elegance akin to a spreading cancer.
Terminal: incurable—
treatable at best; at best, we might have a few more years if we open our eyes and our composters and recognise the hideous threat inside.
Yet what do we do but dally, and dallying disbelieve, concocting implausible counter-explanations, when the truth is decomposing right before us. In our own backyards, by our own design. We are feeding our own destruction, heaping food into the maws of a damp and transmogrifying darkness we have not even begun to comprehend! As they tell us to.
Have we no brains of our own?
No critical reasoning?
What is filled with waste—I ask!—our composters or our minds?
Even now, the Compost Men go about their business.
If you listen, you can hear them:
Hiding behind the hum of air conditioners and passing cars, behind the chatter of our phone and television screens, you’ll discern the incessant buzzing of their flies, and within that buzzing you will hear the sounds of a most hateful decomposition: of us: our pets, our loved ones and ourselves: the decay of the civilization we have built.
So, tonight, hug your dogs and daughters and do it—
Open the composter and gaze inside—
See them churn.
See the way we ourselves churn, for what is a composter if not an analog of the soul: a wasted essential encased in man-made plastic. We have made the eternal perishable, and the physical everlasting.
And now they come for us.
It’s not even just children anymore. They’ve started taking adults. Imagine the power they must feel, hunting with impunity the biggest and strongest of our species.
“How’s Fred?” Carla will ask Zoe, showing her impeccable teeth as she goes mindlessly about her routine.
“Oh, Fred’s gone.”
Gone.
Gone where? Gone how?
These are the questions. Instead, she’ll say, “It’s some weather we’ve been having.”
“Quite.”
And I’m the fool.
“I’m sorry, but we’re not that kind of news source.”
All news is compost news!
How many of us must they take before we act for ourselves, before we quit our routines and unplug from the manufactured daydreams with which they distract us?
I may be an old man, but some of you are young and brave and smart.
Unscrew those lids.
Peer inside.
See the squirming uncomfortable truth.
The Compost Men are coming. Let us at least muster a whimper.