Member-only story
The Sons of Filth
Short Story
“Raindrops die,
Winged-termites are born
Dancing till the lights wake,
They flutter and fall into caged rivers.”
~ Osundolire Ifelanwa
Cattle egrets with coats stained dirty-brown, fluttered away noisily from a mound of rotten meat where flies had sown maggots to grow. Their noisy departure was barely discernible from the click-clacks of sorting forks, drowned out by the noise of the garbage trucks engines as they waited in line to vomit their contents into the mile wide, undulating mountains of refuse that is the Igando landfill.
About twenty odd years back, the Igando landfill had started out as a communal dump site. At the time, the community was far away from civilization, and the local population was barely over 500 people. The government of the time in its wisdom, had considered the community a safe enough distance from the rest of humanity to be designated as a government landfill. Every week, garbage trucks came in from neighboring councils bearing gifts. After two decades of relentless activity, it had spread out into a sprawling hectare of trash, excrement, and the vilest of smells — a vast vocabulary of odors too expansive to comprehend. And the landfill had gradually overtaken the community, reaching in-between the residences…
