Grace Tong
ASTRONAUT EXCRETIONS
When they landed on the moon they left a bag — or rather, bags — of waste. Astronaut excretions. And now, when, if, they go back, they’ll have an accidental science experiment lying in wait. What will have grown there, in these bags supposed to contain the astronaut shit? Will it still be contained by the bags?
I ask myself these questions as I sort through donations in the shop’s back room. Sometimes donations come in bags, fastened tight, left outside the shop after hours, the plastic of the bags straining transparent against their contents. Meagre protection against our city’s unrelenting weather. Sometimes the donations are dumped loose in-store, in the wooden crate that dominates the space in front of the counter. Meg, another volunteer, complains about how ugly it is, how it gets in her way when she’s rearranging the racks. She never mentions it to Keith, the manager, however.
The worst is when the donated clothes are tossed loose at the shop’s doors and it rains overnight.
“Nothing like someone’s damp rags to really start the day,” Meg says, when we open together. She refuses to touch the wet donations so it falls to me, to gather them in my arms, let a wet sleeve slap my leg or drape over my shoulder. There’s no protocol for wet donations and often they end up in our bins, destined for landfill. I try to salvage them. Meg says it’s a waste of time. I think Keith agrees, but since I’m a volunteer, he can’t really force me to not do it.
If Keith comes out back and sees me carefully unpeeling the damp clothes from each other, tenderly untangling sleeves from pant legs, sliding them on to hangers and setting them sufficiently distanced on a rack to dry, he doesn’t say anything. He will ask about the stack of black rubbish bags in the corner, stuffed and knotted. We’re supposed to be trying to make a dent in the backlog of donations, Meg and I, but Meg prefers to organise the shop floor and I am distracted by the damp orphans.
It’s not easy work, hanging the wet clothes, especially when I’m already cold from my walk from the bus stop and the backroom only has a tiny fan heater which shares a multi box with the due-to-retire boxy computer, constantly threatening to blow a fuse.
One of our regulars tells me he’s stopped washing his clothes, because in every wash they leak microfibres into the ocean. I’m not sure if his contribution of microfibres is as impactful as he thinks, but his stench seems to have stabilised.
The black rubbish bags make me think of the bags on the moon. I’m sure they don’t look like this, I’m sure NASA doesn’t use black rubbish bags from the supermarket to store astronaut shit, but I think of them all the same.
The black rubbish bags have been here since before I started. Meg and I started at the same time. Keith doesn’t provide any particular explanation for their presence. I’m sure when I first started the pile was smaller. It is almost the same height as me, now. Perhaps there are new bags arriving overtime. Perhaps the clothes expand as they age. I would’ve thought it was the opposite, that gravity would draw the pile closer to the earth.
Some days when I come in to the backroom I think about throwing myself onto the pile of black rubbish bags. How satisfying it would be, to hear the crinkle of plastic and the whoosh of air exhaling as the clothes compress beneath me. I wonder if the bags on the moon have been able to expand as well.
Apparently there are enough clothes in this country right now that we could import nothing for years and no one would go lacking. Keith wants us to sort through the backlog of donations so they don’t end up in landfill, because one of his KPIs is keeping the shop’s disposal costs down. I think this means he should support my efforts to rescue the damp donations. He thinks this means we need to sort through bags for anything salvageable even if there’s clearly something odious in there. Meg refuses to touch any bags that smell, so I always end up dealing with dirty nappies and sweat-stained clothing.
I’m worried there might be rats living in the pile of black rubbish bags. I’m sure I can hear things moving when my back is turned. The shop space next door has been empty all year and now it’s being renovated. I wonder if the construction has disrupted rodents there, who’ve now moved into my pile of stock.
In summer the backroom is too hot; in winter it is too cold. There is nothing on the moon that would prompt growth in the bags of waste, no bacteria, nothing in the environment to stimulate growth. That is not the case in the shop’s backroom.
Meg wears headphones or plays music out of her phone speaker if she’s sorting clothes in the backroom. I prefer to listen to the space. I don’t think it’s rats I’m hearing in the pile, though, as rodents are usually more scrabbly, their little feet scratching around. No, this almost sounds like breath, the slow inhale and exhale of a slumbering beast. I’m not sure if it is even my ears sensing the motion. It’s more instinctual, a guttural feeling.
I say something to Meg about it. “Do you ever feel like you’re being watched, back here?”
She laughs and gestures at the broken mannequins and the amateur portraits. “Course I do.”
We evolved to sense predators, but I don’t think the bags are hiding anything dangerous.
Meg starts speculating about the contents of the bags. “Do you think they all come from the same person? I’m thinking designer coats and leather handbags, maybe wedding dresses and mink furs.”
“Why don’t you have a look,” I say, but I know she wants to keep the fantasy alive. Some of the bags are supermarket clear-white, or yellow, but it’s the black bin bags that dominate the pile and capture Meg’s imagination. I tell myself it will just be our usual amalgam of some trash, some salvageable items. The age of these bags, everything could have rotted or been moth-eaten. Most of what we get is so worn it holds no value. Distorted beyond original sizes and shapes, stretched and pilled, ratty and threadbare. Whatever makes up this mountain of donations will be barely fit for sale, left here by some do-gooder too guilty to put it in their own wheelie bin, so it will end up in our skip.
It is Meg who dives in first, pulling a bag from the pile and squeezing it. The other bags remain undisturbed. It feels like a game of pick-up sticks. I follow suit and take a bag, careful not to send even a tremble through the remaining. Meg worms a finger into a gap in the knots holding her bag closed and tugs against the plastic. I’m suddenly nervous. My bag feels like it is holding it’s breath — or perhaps that is just me. I’m sure I can hear movement in the pile.
A sea of grey slumps out of the bag and onto the floor. It smells like damp and rot. I open my bag the same way and more grey joins the mound.
“Rags.” Meg says.
“Might have been something, once.” I pick up one of the items. It’s a polo shirt. Meg follows suit, draws out some trousers, then a pair of shorts. They smell like a school gymnasium, body odour and cheap deodorant.
“School uniforms,” Meg says. “I bet that’s what the whole lot is. Keith won’t be happy.”
***
Over the next few months, a loose goods refillery, a vintage consignment shop and a vegan cafe open in the surrounding spaces. I have to pick up more paid work because my rent goes up, and I stop volunteering. Sometimes I take the bus past the shop and I can see Keith and Meg inside. The mannequins in the window have Meg’s fingerprints all over them. Sometimes they are wearing grey school shorts and sometimes I wonder about the shit on the moon.