The Septic Tank

Once there was a woman who fell into a septic tank.

It started with the idea that she and her team would remake the city of Bath. They would recover wayward psyches, replant lost deserts, strain out nasty mental toxicides and replace life’s blacktop, much like the Romans, with hydrotheraputic baths, chants and healing plants. So, this woman got particularly ramped up, aired it out, talked it in, and then moved it forward. The group sallied into the future, confabulating excitonominally and superciduously. Rebathification was a good idea.

In this case, it wasn’t. What people assent to in fabosified confabulation, is not something they will necessarily do. A couple of folded arms and one set of seriously clenched teeth was not noted. Point well taken: Collectiphons, vice-executive appointinators, and their various and sundry followificators, often wear out good sets of dress shoes and high-heels dragging them along behind organizations.

Therefore and thus, the group fiddled and faddled and fromped and clomped in linear-like foward fashion. But then, shockingly, “Thump, and clang,” and a very unexpected hole appeared in the dirt before them. “There is nothing wrong with this,” said someone, but then others weren’t really sure about that. They had broken through the top of a an old, abandoned septic tank.

The team stood around and looked down. The hole seemed small, only six inches across, but below it opened up a pitch black underground expanse of uncertain span. It seemed a kind of Pandora’s box. What was in there? Someone got a flashlight, but the beam was lost in the darkness. What was down there that might subvert the plan? Perhaps it was a kind of stenchifiied envy, or a fecalized jeaousy or just maybe it was a bit of biohazardized malosity. No one knew for sure and no one would say. It was terrifying. It was distubifying. Darkness, underneath the garden — septic, toxic, paranormal perhaps.

That was when the woman fell, or was she shoved, no one was ever able to tell for sure, into the septic tank. She disappeared into the gloom. Everyone was shocked at first. They didn’t know what to do. They had never been here before, on the edge of something new, be it glory or horror, and people who have never been on the edge of the unknown tend to back away very quickly so that they might not fall in.

There was a meeting, as there always is, and it was resolutely decided that it was best to keep the whole thing under wraps. A motion was made, seconded and passed concerning the septic problem, stating that nothing was really lost, found, here, gone, sad, mad or in any way outside of the particularized and assiduouly managable bad.

After that, they filled the hole with pea gravel, for compaction, and poured a concrete cap on it, bobcatted some dirt over it, signed it off, filed it and moved on. That is the way such horrifications usually end, with clean paper, a recognizable signature, a file cabinet and a concrete cap.

It’s interesting to note however, that when looking down into the pit, just before it was filled in with pea gravel, a few of them remarked to themselves, as a kind of verbnostico asside, that they noticed a second chamber in the septic tank, visible through a small hole in the side of the first, and that perhaps there was something living in there, and that this hidden chamber was perhaps at an even deeper level than the first.

It was never filled.