Waste Not, Want Not
“Waste not, want not, waste not, want not...”
Vinny’s melody streams through his sickly-sweet blood and leaks from his vinegar heart into the buzzing veins of the city. He doesn’t sing to the residents with their racing eyes and limbs, they’ve forgotten how to listen. Their motion is too fleeting, too distracted to pick up on Vinny’s frequency waves. After all, they have become deafened by the cries of their own wants. No, Vinny doesn’t sing to them. Instead, his gentle hum calls to the waste that lingers unwanted in rubbish heaps across the city. To the once wanted waste that wonders what exactly it did wrong to be tossed away and left to decay. To the once wanted waste that waits, waits waits… for what exactly? For a warm embrace? A place of belonging?
It is night, but the city doesn’t sleep and neither does Vinny. Street-lamps, head-lights, billboards and 24-hour off licence signs give the city an immortal glow that illuminates Vinny’s path. He wanders the rumbling streets with eyes fixed steadily on the grit of the pavement, but no sensation of the city is lost on Vinny. He carries within him a nocturnal clarity that allows him to see, to really see, through the polluted smog that clouds the vision of passersby. Vinny’s pupils dilate in time with the flashing ‘OPEN’ sign of the all-night supermarket. With a face as deeply lined as the concrete at his feet, he smiles to himself, at nothing in particular. He is a stranger to everyone but the city knows him, and this is all that matters.
It is through his urban dwelling that Vinny’s senses have become so attuned. Each sound takes on a life-force of its own that configures the space and gives birth to a white noise which cradles Vinny’s brain in fuzzy warmth, spurs him onwards in hope. For Vinny knows that if he listens hard enough, he will hear buried deep within the layers of white noise the song of the waste who are hopeful still, hopeful despite, and waiting to be heard. The sounds filter through his ears and into the open jar of his heart which beats, emitting a deep and steady bass line that cuts through the erratic rhythms of the metropolis. With each pulse, it leaks a poignant trail of vinegar.
The fleeting residents who pass Vinny by recoil from the acidic stench, darting further and further away from the freaky bin man. He could contaminate them! His vinegar heart could stain their shiny facades, facades they polish each and every day until they squeak the deafening squeak of cleanliness. They do not dwell but cast away such a ghastly smell and continue on their way. Their shoes tap and crack the pavement in irregular dissonance, as if by marking it with their violent step they can claim it as theirs. But Vinny is unfazed. Beaming with the bittersweet wisdom that comes with age, the marks on his face hold in them a sincere forgiveness that he has learnt over time. This forgiveness gives him the strength to wander on, aglow with the purity of the night.
A fleeting motion of a limb tossing away what it no longer wants, followed by the hauntingly familiar echo of waste being consumed by the void of the bin - Vinny’s attentive gaze is drawn in. The hollow chime ignites a reverberation which stirs the liquid of his heart into a wave. Propelled by a cardiac tide, Vinny’s wandering melody and the wonder of the waste reach a synchronised crescendo, harmonising as they pull towards each other through the current of white noise. Nearer, nearer. Peering into the void, a decaying sea of searching eyes are reflected in Vinny’s pupils. Fragments of orange peel contort into frowning faces, coffee grounds spill from cardboard cups like ashes of the dead, half-empty beer bottles cry tears of glass shards. Releasing a sigh of heavy sentiment, Vinny wipes a tear from his own eye with one hand and clutches the jar of his heart with the other, swiftly detaching it from his chest. He reaches his tear-stained fingers into the sea of decay and croons his gentle tune once more:
“Waste not, want not, waste not, want not...”
One by one, the subjects of waste manoeuvre the remains of their structural integrity into Vinny’s warm embrace, clambering onto his palm, crawling up his arm and leaping into the jar of vinegar with a
plop!
plop!
plop!
With the impact of each plop, the beat of Vinny’s heart transforms into a boom. With a helping hand, the assumed-to-be-decomposing can unite to create a composition of themselves. From this, there is room for them to bloom.
A sharp twang of sweetness rises from the booming bottom of Vinny’s heart and suspends his contentment; the pain reminds him of the helping hand he lacked but so desperately needed as a child. Moved by the unrelenting motion of memory, the city’s buzz begins to distort into a discordant array that dizzies and devours Vinny’s fragile form. Illuminated by ambulance lights, the fleeting faces of the residents flash glares of disgust, sirening in and out and in and out of Vinny’s intermittent vision.
Heartbeat tempo quickens - from steady boom to erratic frenzy. In a purge of negativity, the residents cough and hack away from the bottom of their sour lungs. Phlegm spurts in half time through the polluted smog and lands at the soles of Vinny’s feet. He stares downwards and tries with the integrity of his soul to ground himself, to retune his senses. But his awareness is consumed by the overflowing jar which sways in its unbalance, its sickly-sweetness, and the waste inside are panicking too, calling out, “Vinny, what should you do? What should you do?”
But he can only think of his sickness, the taboo of an open heart. Amidst the sensory overload, the poisonous particles of bacteria from the residents rise up from the grit and collide with Vinny. The pressure makes them move faster. Nearer, nearer to his heart until they infiltrate, beginning to ferociously gnaw at its sweetness, break down its components. Bacteria reacts with sugar - the threat of decomposition is real again and the damage is beginning to be done. As history repeats itself, Vinny’s senses force him backwards in time. The pain arrives - Vinny departs. Shrinking into the child he once was, he is suspended there.
“Sweet heart, sweet heart, sweet heart!”
The sound of sirens mutated into the mocking mantra of the other kids. When he was only a boy, they splurted their jarring jingle into the jar of Vinny’s heart. It was always open wide, theirs closed tightly shut. They inhaled the sickly-sweet odor that it emitted and they were repulsed. So, with a cough and a splutter, their bacteria formed a colony in the lava of sugar that oozed from Vinny’s chest. Too sweet to fight back and too exposed to hide, Vinny could only surrender to the bacteria as it multiplied. Of course, the rotting began in Vinny’s heart. As the bacteria interacted with the sugar, a toxic reaction was triggered and acid began to spread. The poisonous giggles of the other kids grew greater in frequency and acid-induced anxiety burnt its way through his syrupy veins with growing intensity, churning a fire in his stomach, grazing each and every limb. His structural integrity grew weaker and weaker - he was decomposing. Unwanted, sweet Vinny started to waste away from the inside out.
But with a
plop!
plop!
plop!
the wanted waste within his vinegar heart call out to Vinny and bring him back into the present. They sing to him a kinder melody:
“Your sweet heart, your sweet heart, it beats on and on! It is a home, a vinegar home, where we all can belong!”
Vinny smiles down at the waste and they feel the warm sensation of love that they’d been waiting for all along. They feel it touch the decomposing fabric of their being and begin to build back up what was breaking down. The waste are right, Vinny has not decayed, not yet. But their innocent words of reassurance are not enough, for it is only Vinny who knows the antidote to his condition of sweetness. So, he attempts to regain balance and sways along the pavement, glowing eyes searching for the next bin to reach in, with only just enough energy left to murmur his gentle tune:
“Waste not, want not, waste not, want not…”
With dawn edging closer, the night sky is getting lighter and Vinny’s vision blurrier. Vinny reaches and fumbles with tenderness through the void of the bin, hands shaking and fingers colliding with each object of waste like the improvised playing of notes on a piano. His searching grasp reaches past the wailing crackle of crisp packets and tightens around a half-full can of ale which he lifts from the bin to his open lips and empties in a single gulp. The coppery liquid trickles down his throat and filters into his heart with a drip, drip, drip. In synchronisation, Vinny and the wanted waste let out a woozy sigh of relief. For Vinny knows that without alcohol, the bacteria would eat away the sugar of his heart as it did in the past. His heart would be decomposing matter, his heart would turn to waste. Without alcohol, vinegar would not come into being. And without vinegar, Vinny could not be. Without Vinny, the waste could not be preserved, would not be wanted, would never truly matter.
Revitalised by the liquid gold he has sipped, Vinny reaches his pinky finger inside the balanced solution of his heart and stirs so delicately, creating ripples that tickle the waste as they swirl in a tiny whirlpool of vinegar. The wanted waste giggle with newfound integrity as they feel their components align; to them Vinny’s heart is a container of the divine.
The city’s buzz reduces to an ambient murmur as the white noise subsides and whiteness of the day draws nearer. Underneath the rail bridge a flight of pigeons emerge from hiding. One by one, they poke their crooked necks from holes and look with round eyes, unblinking, to the morning. Seeking, they plunge their sooty forms clumsily outwards, descending through the city smog. Hearing the familiar flitter of wings, Vinny raises his eyes and his ears to the birds with wonder. The waste take a peep too. Their gaze is drawn to the sky which resembles, now, a milky hue of pink and blue. The pigeons flock at Vinny’s feet and form a chorus around him. In ritual, Vinny crouches to the ground to greet them, the arch of the bridge casting a comforting shadow around them as they are spotlighted by a seeping stream of approaching daylight.
They begin to sing a lullaby, a lullaby of the dawn:
“Dawn is awoken, pigeons have spoken, closed hearts all broken but we’re still wide open, dawn is awoken beat on, beat on…”
Their melody echoes through the curved structure of the bridge, causing gentle reverberations that provide an underlying hum to the mechanical rattle of the train that passes over them. This shift in frequency disturbs the early morning commuters travelling on board - for a moment they are removed from themselves. Irritated, they take out one earphone and survey their surroundings accusingly. Eyes darting through each other, they frantically try to identify the source of distraction, too short-sighted to take a glance out of the window at Vinny’s chorus below. With a huff and a puff, they reinsert their earphones and dissipate their blame into a monotonous carbon monoxide that is concentrated within the confines of the vehicle. The passengers inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. The train rattles. Their throats become raspy. They cough, cough, cough.
The chorus reaches a calming crescendo and the pigeons ascend from the ground, raising Vinny and the wanted waste with them. The dawn has awoken, so Vinny must sleep. With the urban doves hovering not far above his open heart, Vinny bids the night farewell and sways onwards, homebound. From the shadows of the bridge out into the light - brighter still. From the main road that anticipates another day of stomping limbs and racing eyes, to the side streets. From the exposure of the city to the enclosure of his home. Vinny arrives - the pigeons depart. He gives them a wave goodbye and feels the pull of the cardiac tide of his heart. Smiling down at the waste who peep out at him in wonder, Vinny clutches the jar and swiftly detaches it from his chest. With the jar of his heart securely in one hand, Vinny clasps the ladder attached to the jar of his home with the other. He hoists his fragile form onto the ladder and begins to clamber up, up, up. Bones creaking, jar ringing. Wide open, waste singing. He reaches the top and with a
plop!
plop!
plop!
Vinny empties the vinegar jar of his heart into the giant vinegar jar of his home. The mass of waste inside look up in synchronised delight and rejoice at the sight of their new companions, erupting into chorus:
“Waste not, want not, waste not, want not!”
Once the merry song has been sung, the wanted waste make way for Vinny and he slides into the jar with a splash, sinking to the bottom for a restful day of fermentation. As Vinny snores, bubbles rise from his open mouth, reaching the surface with a pop as his heart is restored by the vinegar solution of his creation. He dreams the dream of home, sweet home, sweet heart.
Hearing the popping signal, the waste are informed of Vinny’s subconscious slumber. It is time for them too, to rise. Whilst the day is bright and the fleeting residents are awake, they must seize the opportunity to transform the motion of the city, to decide its fate. In a collective upsurge, the waste lift their pickled forms up through the safe coating of vinegar and emerge wide eyed to greet the bright blue sky. Not forgetting to give Vinny a tender stir that submerges him deeper in blissful sleep before they leave, they slide down the ladder one by one. With a whistle and a
w
o o
o o
o o
o o
sh
the waste kerplunk to the ground and sway onwards, citybound. From the enclosure of home to the exposure of the city. The waste wander in slow motion, winding through the side streets, moving closer and forming bonds. They fuse their infinite matter and begin to expand, wider and fuller. When they reach the main road, now an unrecognisable wantland of blinding white light, they have grown as tall as skyscrapers. As a single heart beating vinegar waves into the urban scope, the waste start to sing. They don’t sing to the residents who race their eyes and limbs away from the pungent flood, it is too late for them to listen. Instead, their gentle hum calls to the rest of the once wanted waste that lingers in rubbish heaps across the city. As they sing, waste rises from the void of each and every bin to join them, fusing into the giant heart. Propelled by the spirit of revolution, a tsunami wave of vinegar is released as they chant:
“We are the wanted waste and this is a wasteland now! We are the wanted waste and this is a wasteland now!”
Adrift somewhere in the ocean of vinegar, Vinny floats in his jar above an underwater city, snoring. He listens from the depths of his fermenting subconscious to the immersive lullaby of waste not, want not, waste not, want not.
by Liv Kisby
Vinny is a man with an open jar for a heart - he wanders through the city streets at nighttime, offering his vinegar-filled heart as a home for the unwanted waste of the rubbish bins.
Liv Kisby is a Media & Comms student who specialises in radio. They are interested in exploring the notions of space, place, belonging and affect through written word and sound. They also enjoy making music, which can be found at:
The thumbnail design is by Dimitar Dimitrov