Reading Time: 3 minutesIt was always an outlandish reaction. What was he thinking. You’re mad and disturbed. Frank had an idea and the idea grew stronger with each rejection. Everyone had a different reason for reacting in their own way. Sadly he didn’t understand why their reactions were so volatile or so colourful. Think about your dead.
All Frank wanted to do was to change the way people thought about their dead. He wanted to change the way they managed them as well. Their dead cats, dogs, budgies, fish and of course their own loved ones. Why was it such a hard sell?
Burying them in specific ways, burning them and spreading them about, or indeed flushing them down the toilet .. what was that all about? The great idea that Frank was promoting was so intensely different, that the audience who had been granted exposure to this new and drastic solution just couldn’t come at it, not at all.
The ingenious system of disposing of dead things came to Frank when he was walking the dogs through a local park. Council had kindly provided a playground with a soft rubbery ground layer to reduce the risk of injury to those little terrors running and playing on the equipment. This ground cover was a material apparently made from recycled tyres.
Frank pondered the material while he was watching his two dogs mark their territory on this playground. Unfortunately one of his “puppies” followed the minor “marking wee” with a hot steaming turd that caused no end of screams from the parents of the little terrors. The excrement was picked up and while doing so, Frank felt the unique surface. He had the momentous idea about changing the way humans dispose of their dead.
He would help the environment, reduce the cost of dealing with the dead, save the overuse of cemeteries and remove the ridiculous insurance scams that permeated through cable television. He’d recycle them into things like .. dog toys, garden furniture, pavement sealant and fertilizer. This recycling process could also help to power small communities or shopping centres who’ll benefit from the electricity generated in these mid sized industrial centres.
The slogan had been worked out already: Don’t waste your dead – reuse them.
Frank wasn’t very good at advertising and he realized that he’d need some professional help. Help did come in the form of a silent partner named Ruth Mantles who had enough money and a single minded reduce/reuse/recycle mantra. She also has a factory that practiced what she preached. If she couldn’t reduce or reuse – she recycled the shit out of it. In fact shit was the prime ingredient of her final product.
The best fertilizer in South East Queensland. Ruth’s Anti Droop as it was branded, was terribly successful and Ruth wanted to do more.
For years Frank and Ruth pushed on trying to sell the idea of recycling the dead, but alas Frank died in a horrific industrial accident. Sadly his body was contaminated with battery acid and chlorine and couldn’t be recycled as he might have intended.
His liquid remains were stored in a concrete block and then after a few years (and when it was deemed safe) it was burned in an offshore iron ore smelting facility as a fire starter. He was reused. This process and the resulting product was named Frank Fire Starter in honour of Frank.
This method of starting industrial furnaces gave Ruth some ideas but they caught the attention of the authorities and she was shut down. This explosive concoction was just to dangerous. Ruth married a professional surfer and was last seen wildly drunk in the Philippines whilst getting Frank’s name tattooed on her bottom. She disappeared right after that sighting and the rest of her life remains a mystery.
An increasingly grumpy old fart posting rants, observations and trying to write somewhat twisted short stories for adults. All rights reserved unless otherwise credited © Alan Crawford - 2024
