at your disposal

I was on a ferry, working as the disposal guy. I tried for the cushy disposal job, the one where I could bale together all the plastic jugs and stomp the aluminum cans, but that didn't work out. My boss said that job was for newbies, and he had a related job that got much better tips. That's how I became the dead body disposal guy. Whatever dead bodies people brought me, I would wrap in black trash bags, then grab some ballast from belowdecks and shove the whole package overboard under cover of darkness. Strangely, the ship's ballast was almost entirely made up of old manual typewriters, the kind that an old Harlan Ellison novel said were by far the best things for weighting down a corpse.

It was steady work. Every night we'd do five runs across the harbor, and on every run, at least one group of shady, jittery bad guys came to my tiny office dragging a dead goon by the hair. No paperwork, no questions, just my life on the ship of ghouls. The downside was not being able to tell my friends what I did for a living, so I had to say I was a bartender. Still, it put me through college, and then the ferry conveniently sailed into a fog bank and never came out. I had nothing to do with that, by the way. I heard the boss just got burned out and one night he called the disposal guy who made whole ships go away, not questions asked.

Fair enough, I guess.

--- from a dream March 2007