ALL THAT IS LOST
by
Gianna Spitaliere
75,700 words
The old homeless man’s grocery cart carries everything you can imagine: mold-filled clothes, mismatched shoes, a hotplate and a toaster, lost socks, lost earrings, lost photographs, lots of lost things, and lots of trash too—food trash, dead trash, human trash, the kind of things you might find at the bottom of the ocean—it carries grief, loss, hatred, lots of hatred, and blame. The cart bursts at the seams from carrying the blame for the entire town of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Despite all he carries, every single person in town hates the man. No one knows a single thing about him, yet they all find reasons to hate him. Here are a few:
He typically stations his cart right at the intersection of Kerr Ave and Market St. It’s a shitty spot. There are no left-turns from Kerr to Market but most ignore that sign causing traffic to pile up in un-godly ways. Three budget supermarkets sit within spitting distance of the cheap townhomes with damaged roofs and garbage for lawns. There’s a Taco Bell with an H spray-painted over the B by its own employees on the brink of suicide. And across from that is one of the donate-your-plasma-for-money places, a Hooters, an ancient strip mall with only a few shops left alive, too many motels, the Riverbed Mini Mart, and one glimmering Chick-fil-A that is consistently absorbed by an enormous line of people who hate the man with the grocery cart.
This area of town is right in-between the ocean and downtown making it pretty much the least-attractive place to live in Wilmington. There are no ‘beach people’ like you’d imagine the coastal town to consist of, not a Wings Beachwear in sight. But it is just about the cheapest area in town to live in. Of course, rent is not an issue for the old man, but he still loves this corner. It’s his home.
Although no one knows his name, most people just refer to him as “Mr. Kerr” or sometimes the “old crackhead with the cart.” But for the purpose of this story, we will call him Mr. Kerr.
***
Mr. Kerr sits inside of his cart atop the wobbling pile with two tampons shoved into his nostrils. By the first of September, the entire town is fully saturated in the Wilmington Smell. It’s a smell that all of the inhabitants recognize, truly a phenomenon. Many describe it as cat litter, wet trash, manure, maybe even sewage. Rumors say a factory dumped some kind of chemical into the Cape Fear River a few decades back and got sued. Now the tap’s unsafe to drink and the aroma will never leave.
It’s always strongest right after it rains. And it rains just about every damn day of spring and summer, sometimes fall and winter too. So by this first day of September, when the entire town is underwater from the summer of rain, the stench consumes the air. It leaks into everyone’s homes, clings to their clothes, and drives them mad.
But the worst part about the Smell is the reminder: it is officially hurricane season. The town stinks its worst right after a storm hits. So on the extra potent days, it feels a bit too familiar. The taste of destruction is palpable, choking each and every resident when they open their doors and are hit with the awful reminder against their morning tongues.
The town hasn’t been hit with a massive hurricane in quite a few years and people are starting to stir. It’s that time of year where everyone can sense what’s coming, though few dare to speak of it.
Mr. Kerr climbs out of his cart and rummages around for a moment before retrieving a stick of meat wrapped in plastic. He sits back down next to his cart on the sidewalk and gnaws on the summer sausage he found next to the gutter this morning, the two cotton strings still dangling from his nose and twisting into the cracks of his chapped lips.
The shops all around him are a bit busier than usual. He watches people shuffling in and out of parking lots with jugs of water and milk, bread, toilet paper, and canned food. He knows exactly what this means. It never makes sense to him that these people panic-purchase milk. Won’t that be the first thing to spoil when the power goes out?
Despite the crowds and traffic and rushing, no one looks panicked. No, they look excited. Excited to be scared. Excited to find somewhere new to place their blame.
A woman and her toddler shuffle past the old man with arms full of plastic bags. The woman tugs at the boy's arm so hard that his shoulder nearly dislocates.
“Do not go near him,” she hisses.
The boy’s wide and curious eyes stare at the man as if he is some creature crouching beneath his bed in the middle of the night. Mr. Kerr contorts his face and scares the boy more.
The old man is neither excited nor panicked. He cannot care less, in fact. He’s lived through more hurricanes than he can count. The storm is just another wet and miserable day. Having no shelter during a hurricane just means you have nothing to lose. If anything, he’ll get to enjoy the streets to himself when more of his homeless colleagues head inland.
On Wednesday, all of the shops and houses start boarding up their windows. Soon, it looks like a scene straight out of a post-apocalyptic film where each building is coated in plywood and graffiti. Sandbags line the doorways of every shop. Whispers of looting are now part of normal conversation. The days before a storm hits are the strangest ones; there’s an odd mixture in the air between those who fear the world is ending and those who are excited that it might.
The hurricane is projected to hit on Thursday night. Many residents are already leaving town, but even more choose to stay. These are the types of people who think God, or their good looks, or their GPA, or their bank account, or their hunting rifles, or their confederate flags can protect them from a natural disaster. These are the same people buying milk.
On Thursday morning, the town announces an emergency evacuation meaning that if you stay, no one will come to save you. 911 is shut down, the hospitals are closed, even the police stations and ambulances cannot be reached. More people leave after this and wait in the bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours trying to get out of town. But many stay. Too many.
The homeless man carefully fashions a tarp across his cart with an assortment of bungee cords and ropes. He knots it all to a light pole on the sidewalk where he sits and waits. Not a single one of the cars driving by asks if he has somewhere to go during the storm. They don’t even look at him. But he is glad.
Had anyone paid closer attention, they might have known. They might have seen what he was doing, what he was planning.
Most assume that his cart is filled with random trash, but that cannot be further from the truth. Every item is an asset. An asset for a carefully detailed plan.
You see, the old homeless man’s grocery cart carries everything you can imagine—but it is still missing the handful of key ingredients needed to perform his ultimate plan. One that he has spent years planning, carefully detailing and listing out each and every item he will need. And now, as the hurricane rips toward town, he is finally ready to collect all of the lost and forgotten things that will surface from the storm. Everything that he needs to conduct the ultimate act of redemption, or revenge. It’s too soon to tell which it will be.
A couple of blocks away from the intersection of Kerr and Market is a small side road that ends in a cul-de-sac with a rusted sign that reads Yester Oaks Dr. The cashier from the Riverbed Mini Mart lives in the house at the end of the street with her younger sister.
Each house is identical to the next with cream-colored side panels that are stained with green mold, a fenced front and back porch, broken screens behind the windows, and yards littered with junk. They look like the kind of houses that should be attached to one another but are not. Imagine the American Football album cover, you know the one.
The inside of each house has an absurdly small kitchen with an absurdly large living room. There are two bedrooms, two baths, and a third “bedroom” that’s really more like a closet. The floors are a mixture of bubbled vinyl and stained, torn carpet. The walls are painted all different colors from each resident who comes and leaves. Maintenance never fixes these types of things.
The girls’ house is covered in the most random assortment of posters you could imagine: Blink 182’s “Enema of the State”, a geological mapping of Chicago, the local university’s mascot chugging a PBR, though neither of them have ever set foot on campus, Wheezer’s Blue Album, a frog smoking a blunt, the Nirvana baby, and quite a few more. They carefully cover each cigarette stain and hole in the wall, but you would never know. And the furniture in the home is even more mismatched. There is way more of it than they would ever need, making the enormous living room somehow still feel cramped. But again, they needed to cover the missing patches of carpet with something.
The inside of their kitchen is lined with white subway tiles filled with black, dirt-coated grout. A few of the tiles beneath the oven are missing, exposing raw dirt. It didn’t take long for a small weed to begin growing into their home. Neither of them have the heart to rip it out, instead, it slowly stretches its arms throughout the kitchen, gradually reaching farther and farther with each spring.
Behind their home sits a retention pond about the same size as the house. The water is always green and reeks of the Wilmington Smell. During the warm months, which is most, it becomes infested with thousands of frogs. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. They cover the entire back exterior of the home and often find their way inside. But the worst part is the croaking. Each evening it grows so loud they can no longer watch TV, speak to each other from across the room, or even sleep. They quite literally cannot hear themselves think. It’s hypnotic. Like a constant alarm surrounding their home, it can drive anyone mad. But they’re used to it. They are unfazed each time one screams and pulls the rest into a riot. And they’re unfazed finding the squashed bodies of frogs in the cracks of their doors from slamming without looking.
Despite it all, they love this house. It is all they can have but it is more than enough. The eldest girl, Alice, has been raising her sister for most of their lives. It’s the classic story: mom and dad were drunks, dad beat mom, mom drank herself to death, dad went to jail. When Alice was only 16 years old, she was left raising baby Florence who could hardly even walk yet. They bounced around foster cares for a few years until she turned 18 and could legally adopt her. That’s when she got her job at the Riverbed Mini Mart to start making money for rent.
The Mini Mart is like the type of convenience store that’s attached to a gas station, though they do not sell gas. Just cheap snacks and beer. And her boss is a piece of shit.
“Last night I was driving a buddy home from downtown, he lives down that little cul-de-sac street on Kerr, and I saw your car parked at one of those houses. You weren’t buying drugs, were you? That kind of street looks like it’s exclusively for drug dealers and Mexicans,” she says to Alice on the morning before the hurricane is announced.
“I live there,” she says. Of course, she doesn’t mention that she is selling drugs, not buying. But that’s beside the point.
“Oh,” her boss shrugs and takes another drag from her cigarette.
Alice and her boyfriend both sell drugs, but they aren’t drug dealers. And before you say anything—yes, there is a difference. They sell occasionally, and just to their friends. They aren’t moving anything. The farthest anything ever moves is just a few blocks over.
Her boyfriend, Ethan, lives three houses down from her with some of his old college buddies. They all went to the university but none of them ever graduated. Ethan works at the plasma donation center down the road where he pricks real drug addicts’ arms every day so they can have the cash to buy beer and cigarettes for the night. And he doesn’t judge—he buys the same things with his paycheck.
***
The day he moved into the house, Alice was sitting on the part of her roof that hangs right below the second-story window. She was barefoot, wearing just her underwear and an enormous, bleach-stained hoodie, holding a blunt in one hand and a Dr. Pepper in the other. He remembers imagining the patterned imprint that the shingles must have left on her bare butt cheeks.
“Lemme get a hit,” he yelled from the street, holding what appeared to be a poorly-painted pumpkin.
“It’s not Halloween yet,” she said.
“This is art, not a jack-O-lantern.”
“Oh,” she said and tossed down the bottle of Dr. Pepper.
“I meant the blunt, smartass,” he said with a grin before taking a swig from the bottle and realizing it was more than just Dr. Pepper.
“You better talk nicer to me if you think you’re getting any of this,” she said.
“Ok, my sweet, beautiful, intelligent, mysterious new neighbor, would you please be so kind and let me take one little measly hit?” He was on his knees now, pretending to beg.
She tossed it down to him, burnt-end in front. It hit him in the neck and left a small, red circle. He quickly picked it up and hit it anyway.
“Keep it,” she said and climbed back into the window, exposing her entire bare ass and tie-dye thong to the street.
It didn’t take long for them to hook up after that. She quickly became his new go-to dealer. For a while, she was in charge. She made the money, she held the goods, and he did whatever she said. But soon they became a team.
***
Between the two, they know enough people to make rent off sales alone each month. Their jobs are just for spending money now. All of which goes toward boos and nonsense; none of which goes toward her little sister.
Florence is an annoying kid. Partially because she is the only kid on the street and never has any friends to learn how to be normal from. But mostly because she is too happy. She’s too happy for someone living on this street. Too happy for someone with a house full of holes. Too happy for someone who’s only ever been raised by people who didn’t give a shit about her.
You see, there are two types of people in this world: those who innately believe that all people are good until proven otherwise, and those that believe all are bad, period. Florence is the first and her sister is the latter. Both are equally dangerous.
Evacuating town for the hurricane is not an option for the girls. They are each sitting in the living room with Ethan and some dude who’s buying a gram when the news hits.
“Hurricane Florence is projected to hit the Bahamas by Tuesday, the Keys by Wednesday, then South and North Carolina’s coast by Thursday.”
“Oh my god!” Florence jumps up from her coloring page, “That’s my name! They named the hurricane after me!”
“Shhh,” Alice says. “Let me listen.”
“Hurricane Florence is projected to hit Wilmington and surrounding areas by 10 pm, Thursday evening. It is currently a category five, producing wind speeds up to 185mph.”
“That’s why I’m stocking up now,” the friend of Ethan’s says. “Last time we had a bigger hurricane, all my dealers went dry for months. I had to live off solely dabs for so long. Do you know what that does to your head? I can’t do that again, man. Gotta be prepared this year.”
“Shit,” Ethan says, licking the edge of the white-grape-flavored blunt wrap. “You know what that means, babe?”
“Hurricane party!” Alice shouts.
“Hell yeah,” Ethan says. “I’ll start making some pre-rolls and weighing out gram bags to sell at the party. We’re due for a rager this year.”
“Big-time,” she says.
“But the people on TV are saying it’s not safe for us to stay,” Florence whines.
“The people on TV don’t know shit,” Ethan says. “This is what our tax dollars are going toward—weathermen who can’t tell the difference between sunshine and hail if it hit them right in their thick skulls?”
“I don’t think that’s what our taxes are paying for—” Florence starts.
“Darling,” Alice interrupts, “we don’t have to worry like the rest of town does. We’ve got the retention pond out back, remember? It’ll soak up all the water like a big giant sponge while we get to play the no-power game.”
“Fine,” Florence says. She hates how her sister still talks to her like she’s six years old. She might only be ten, but she’s lived through enough to be an adult. She does their dishes, walks herself to school, even watches adult movies with them. That’s her favorite thing about Ethan, he’s always treated her like an equal.
On Thursday morning, Alice and Ethan get to stay home from work. Everything in town is closed, mostly everyone is gone, and there’s no one left to donate plasma. The blue, poorly-painted, chipped kitchen table is covered in cases of beer and bottles of liquor.
“Do you think this will be enough?” Ethan asks.
“For the party or for after the storm?” Alice responds.
“Both.”
“Probably not,” she says. “But it’s the best I could do. The Mini Mart was nearly cleared out yesterday. I took everything we had left.”
They sort through each of the boxes, taking tallies of everything they have and anything they might want to hide and ration for post-party-still-no-power days. Florence is sitting on the floor in the living room, eyes peeled up toward the box television that’s been playing the same evacuation notices for hours.
“That’s starting to get old already, Florence,” Alice says. “Can you shut that shit off?”
“I’m bored,” she whines.
“I wasn’t really asking.” Alice grabs the remote and turns it off herself. “Now, since you’re so bored, you are going to be a darling little angel and run to the store to grab us the rest of the supplies for the party. I’ll write you up a list.”