Glory's Revision

The horse-drawn cart slipped easily through the last closing crack. Morbinary pulled in the reins and stepped down, appraising the new budding space. Behold! The roiling pre-Slurry (as it was called in the previous Iteration; who knows what it might come to be called in this one?), the ridiculous piles of garbage floating about.   "One universe's trash..." thought Morbinary, and lit the dingy, yellowed gaslamp on the cart.   Kaipper scuffed one hoof curiously, patiently, in the billowing dust. Novelty was nothing new.   "They'll be along, soon enough," Morbinary said. "Let's set up the shop. Here, I think, by the last tatters of the gate." As Morbinary measured careful paces from one boulder to the next (the shop would fit for now, oh yes, though eventually there would have to be an expansion), a small object flopped through the portal and landed in the dirt.   A pile of rags—no, more than that. But not much more. It had a face, of sorts, and its soft plush body was worn from years of tiny clasping, loving hands, followed by the endless limbo of storage and black mold. Morbinary was reminded of the Gaudiami, once-proud folk from two or three iterations back.     “Well! You’ve been through a few cycles, haven’t you?” The toy was missing an arm, all of its eyes, and anything that might have once been below the torso. “I’ve got just the thing,” said Morbinary, scooping the doll up and carrying it gently to the cart while Kaipper snuffled contentedly and lapped at a bit of old moss on one of the rocks.   More trash came flying through the opening: dubious gifts from the old universe to the next. A set of bed sheets, meticulously embroidered with an old family crest and now soiled nearly beyond recognition. A plastic bag full of oozing mopple-melon scraps (the fruit was a common delicacy in the Parthing Province, though the rinds were bitter and pessimistic, and the seeds tended to clamp on to the tongue and not let go.) A soup can filled with ancient pink-handled toothbrushes.   It may have just been the fractal winds whipping bits of sand against the drifting stones. Or perhaps the doll really did make a small sound. Softly, pitifully. A cottony sound tinged with longing and dust.   “What’s that? Die? You want...? Pfah. Don’t be silly.”   Morbinary reached behind a shimmering purple curtain and rummaged in a wooden bin for a minute, finally producing a discarded tri-pincer from a highly evolved and best-not-mentioned insectoid race. This was carefully affixed to the doll’s torn shoulder with a length of fishing wire and a dab of superglue.   A bit of dark liquid muck dripped from the corner of the doll’s empty eye-socket.   “Oh, no, my friend.” Morbinary wiped it away with a clean white rag. “You’re at the very bottom, now. You can’t stop here. The wheel turns, and turns, and turns. We’re just getting started again, and this one, you won’t want to miss. It’s going to be good.”   Several hundred old shoes rained down upon them for half a minute. Kaipper was disappointed to find that only a few of them were edible.   “I’ve been saving these.”   In a flash, a tiny silver tin slipped out from Morbinary’s breast pocket. The lid snapped open to reveal a brand new pair of googlie-eyes, exactly the right size for the doll’s face. With a couple more dribbles of glue, the eyes were in place. “Now you’ll be able to see it all!”   The piles of trash around them were growing: mounds of rubber tires. A forest’s-worth of deadfall. Every unsold item from every neighborhood yard sale. National Geographics, thousands of years old, all of them with a few pictures cut out for grade-school collage projects, followed by said grade-school collage projects, discarded by the ream.   Morbinary placed the doll atop one of the piles, propping it upright against a rotten teal-leather loveseat, where it could bask in the Purideic energy.   “I’m sorry I have nothing with which to replace your lower appendages,” said Morbinary, “but I’m sure that you’ll find something. And now, I have a business to run, and you have...whatever you can come up with. I’ll just leave you to it. No charge. My pleasure. On the house.”   The googlie-eyes glowered in the dusty orange light as a tsunami of the previous iteration’s garbage flowed across the plane.           The doll—whose name, by the way, was Glory—suspected that Morbinary never gave anything away “on the house.”