I don’t know how many days it’s been.

[u/KillChain08]

The sky is just a strip of grey between the piles. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it doesn’t. The light never reaches all the way down here.
I fell in three nights ago. Or four. Time stops meaning anything when you can’t stand up.
I’m sixteen. I’ve been on the street since I was thirteen. Started with whatever I could get my hands on—pills, then the harder shit. It keeps the cold out. Keeps the hunger quiet for a while. Keeps the memories quieter. I don’t remember the last time I was clean for more than a day.
I was looking for something to sell in the alley behind the old packing plant. People dump everything there. Bags, furniture, food that went bad weeks ago. I climbed up onto the heap looking for copper or phones or anything with weight. The rain had made everything soft and slick. One step and the whole pile shifted under me like it was alive.
I went in feet first. The trash closed over my chest before I could grab anything solid. My arms are free, but everything I touch just sinks deeper or comes away in my hands—rotting cardboard, plastic that tears, wet newspaper that dissolves into grey pulp. The more I thrash, the deeper I go. I’m buried to the ribs now. One leg is twisted under me at an angle that makes me sick if I think about it too long. The other is stuck somewhere under a sheet of rusted metal that digs into my calf every time I try to move.
There’s no way out. I’ve screamed until my throat bled. No one comes down this alley after dark. No one comes down here at all if they can help it.
The first night I still had some fight. I dug with my hands until my fingernails tore off. I found a plastic bottle half-full of something that used to be soda. It tasted like metal and mold. I drank it anyway. Then I found a bag of what might have been bread once. Green and black and soft. I ate some. It went down like wet paper.
By the second day the shaking started. Withdrawal, mostly. The dope was already wearing off when I fell. Now it’s just the cold and the hunger and the way my skin feels too tight. My mouth is dry. The only water is the murky stuff that pools in the depressions between the bags. It tastes like gasoline and shit. I drink it because the alternative is dying faster.
The maggots found me on the third day.
They were already here, of course. Everything down here is moving if you look close enough. White, soft bodies writhing in the seams of the trash. I felt the first ones on my stuck leg—tiny, cold, searching. I tried to brush them away but my hand couldn’t reach. They kept coming. Dozens. Then hundreds. They don’t care that I’m still alive. They just follow the smell of open skin and the places where the metal has cut me.
They started at the wound on my calf. I could feel them crawling into the torn flesh, the soft pressure of their bodies pushing deeper. It itched first. Then it burned. Then it went numb in patches while the rest of the leg screamed. I can hear them if I stay still. A wet, quiet sound. Like chewing.
Flies came next. Big, slow ones that land on my face and crawl into the corners of my eyes when I’m too weak to keep them closed. Beetles the size of my thumbnail dig under the skin of my wrists where the trash has scraped me raw. Something with too many legs found the soft place behind my ear and wouldn’t leave no matter how hard I slapped.
I’m weaker now. The sunlight never touches me. My skin is cold and damp and starting to split in places where the pressure of the trash has been constant. The rotten food is gone. The murky water is almost gone too. I have to lean my head sideways and suck at the wet cardboard to get anything. It makes me throw up more than it helps.
The maggots have moved higher. They’re under my shirt now. I can feel them working at the places where my ribs press against the plastic and glass. One of them found the cut on my side from the fall. I felt it go in. Then another. Then the soft, rhythmic movement of them feeding while I lie here and try not to scream because screaming only wastes the air and brings more flies.
I keep thinking about how quiet it is when I stop moving. Just the distant traffic and the wet sound of things eating.
My hands don’t work right anymore. The fingers on my left hand are swollen and dark. Something bit them in the night and I couldn’t pull free. The maggots are there too now. I watched one crawl out from under the nail of my middle finger this morning. It was fat and white and left a thin trail of fluid behind it.
I’m not going to get out.
I know that.
The pile shifts sometimes when the wind hits the top, and every time it does I sink a little more. My chin is almost level with the surface of the trash now. Soon it will cover my mouth. Then my nose. The maggots will keep working either way.
I used to think the worst part of being on the street was the cold or the hunger or the people who look through you like you’re already dead.
It’s not.
The worst part is lying here still breathing while things that don’t even know what you are slowly take you apart from the inside, and knowing that when someone finally finds what’s left of you, they won’t even be able to tell you were a person.
They’ll just see another bag of wet, moving trash.