“Why are we down here?”

An old woman laughed, rocking back and forth in an old, decrepit chair, outfitted with various pieces of garbage to remain intact. The end of a ski, the back of a dining room chair, the nails taken from an old pallet, and the long metal barrel from a rifle had all been integrated into the shoddy chair, which stood as it was half slanted. Grandma’s body shifted the opposite way, and together, the chair and the woman perfectly fitted to each other, they formed a balanced whole.

A child sat on the floor, inherently filthy, no matter how many times it was cleaned. “Why? Where’s the sun and the clouds and the sky? Why are we down here?”

The old woman leaned forward in her rocking chair, and with some effort, she peeled herself from the back of wood and fiberglass skis. Her flesh was loose and soft, and her stomach fat hung around her waist, riding forward on her thighs when she leaned toward the little boy. She reached out with an old hand covered in age spots, decorated with a silver ring that had been grafted together from remnants of broken jewelry. She stroked the child’s thick black hair, messing with it.

“Stop!” The little boy retracted from her grasp, scooting himself backwards across the dusty floor. Grandma looked at him for a moment, her hand still outstretched, then laughed and leaned back, melting back into her chair.

“Why are you asking? Want to go up?”

“Yes!” The kid shouted. Grandma hushed him, her eyebrows coming together.

“Everyone’s sleeping,” She scolded, her kind face scrunched up into a scowl. The child looked up at her with a grimace, halfway between regret and frustration. She relaxed back into her chair again, and her face became calm. “Why do you want to go up?”

“Because,” the little boy said. His green eyes flashed as the warm lantern light flickered off them. “It stinks down here. And it’s dirty, and it’s dark. I hate it. It’s–” The kid paused, looking away for a moment. “Hell.”

“Hey now,” she said, but she could not refute anything he was saying. Despite having long accepted it herself, there was no way to disprove what her little grandson said, and at this dissonance a subtle, uncanny feeling came forth in her chest. “Don’t copy your daddy. He’s got a potty mouth.”

She rocked back and forth in the shoddy chair, thinking about what the little man said. “You shouldn’t say that about where we live,” she said. “Okay?” There was a hint of weakness, a dash of sadness to her voice.

“But it’s true.” She looked down at his pale face, never having been touched by the sun, at his eyes, never having seen white clouds and a blue sky. His body never having known freedom, and yet still his mind imagining what all these things would be like, absorbing himself in his fantasies, and then the grime, the smells, the filth, the slosh, the darkness dragging him back to reality, shredding his fantasies and sending him back down the sewers to rot into the earth.

She sighed, rocking back slowly. She closed her eyes. Her chest ached. Their reality burned fresh into her mind, fresh into her flesh as the little man reminded her of it. To be an adult in a place like this meant having the ability to ignore reality. To run away from it. To find ways to distract oneself, to separate oneself from it. It was really quite a simple thing; to master this single skill was to be happy. That was all there was to understand.

And yet it all came back to her. The darkness. The vileness. The decrepit depths, the filthy secrets, the pain, the dark, lonely suffering, all of it flooded back and filled her mind like the same kind of sewage that they picked through, that they found their food in, that they bathed in, drank, and were born from.

She looked down at the boy, darkness in her eyes. “Lurk, when we die, where do we put the dead people?”

He looked up at her for a moment, his Grandma’s gaze making him feel uneasy, unwell. He looked away, and he thought about her question.

“When food is rotten, or when it can’t be eaten, where does it go?”

He looked up at her again, looking at those dark eyes, which the light of the lantern could not reach. Folds of skin, the depths of her brow, the reaches of her age and bones and skin hid her eyes, which sank back into that mess of flesh and fat and skin like two black holes carved into her face.

“When we go to the toilet, where does the toilet let out? When we lose something, where do we say it goes? When we have trash, where do we put it?”

She looked down at him and waited for an answer. The little boy looked at her, his green eyes wide. His palms were filthy, covered in grime and dirt, and as he began to sweat, little puddles of mud formed around his fists. His little heart beat fast.

“When something is broken, and when it cannot be reused, when it is absolutely unneeded, where does it go, Lurk?”

His little body trembled slightly, scared of his kind grandma. The cold air felt frigid to his skin. The soft lantern light felt jarring to his eyes.

The rocking chair leaned forward, and then with great effort, his grandma pulled herself to her feet, heavily leaning on a gnarled wooden cane she clutched in her root-like hand. Her flesh sagged around her waist as she stood. Her shadow, curled forward and lopsided like she was, shone onto the concrete walls and low ceiling. She took a crippled step toward him, and he jumped back.

“Lurk, to them we were broken. We were absolutely unneeded, and so they threw us away here.”

Slowly, she made her way to the back of the room, where a tunnel had been chiseled through the concrete wall. “Come on. It’s time for bed.”