The spire bisects the wastewater treatment plant and the community gardens maintained by the Deerfield Retirement Community. It draws in blood from these two sources like an enormous needle. Seniors and shit are suctioned up into the steel confines of the police spire. Filtered, shaken, milked and processed so that the sucking machine can live.
When Great Grandma Hildegaard passes, and the relatives are too busy to collect her remains, the beds tilt and she slides into the catacombs beneath the community centre like a B-movie trap door executing its best special effects moment. She slides under the well-tended beds of the community gardens to the tune of comical music and an animated commercial for toothpaste, bumping against walls, her dead legs flopping in the air. G.G.H. tumbles along a chute, along with G.G.J. and numerous other centenarians, until they clatter like bowling pins into a well-oiled gutter.
This intersection is where the proximity of the wastewater treatment plant shines in its efficacy. As the bodies collect against the grate, too large to pass through, so too do the nanomachines and artificial cleaners collect in great swarms from their nanohives in the inside-out uteri of the treatment plant.
G.G.H. herself would most likely have passed listening to the top forty of her heyday, even if she never really liked those songs, they would have tickled her Alzheimer’s into believing that today was a once treasured moment and the vast potential of her life lay before her like an unspoiled napkin. Great feast ahead, patiently waiting for the main course, and secretly pining for the decadent dessert sure to follow. If this scene is frozen grey across the eyes and cortex of G.G.H.’s deceased body then, in its passive state it does also witness the slow dissolving of its constituent parts as the nanomachines clip, shear, and snip molecules of flesh. The soft raindrops, bits of Great Grandmother Hildegaard, are removed from the corpus and join the effluvia jettisoned by the treatment plant.
Arthur Challenger 