d6m. mario mario [fin]

He was used to being swallowed up under darkness, down in the tunnels to check on pressure pumps and clogs. They sent most of the young boys down the huge green pipes since the work was dangerous, and rote enough anyone could learn it within the first few days of starting at the waste treatment plant.

Working the night shift didn’t make much of a difference when Mario spent most of his time underground in the first place.

Half the night he’d be drawn up in rubber boots and overalls, face mask in a half-hearted attempt to block out the stench of sewage with a yellow hard hat on his head trudging through the shit and brown running water. A headlight would burn out the way forward, but he learned soon enough to always keep a hand on the metal rungs that lined the walls. A surge in the waves at his ankles could easily wipe out a grown man, let alone a teenager, and pull him down the tunnels to let the filth be his tomb.

He’d only thrown up a few times from the smell, most of the time filling his own mask and causing his regurgitation to explode out the sides along his chin. By the third week in the sewers, the smell had burned most of the olfactory sensors out and kept the bile at the back of his throat.

A trusty pair of headphones and a CD player would blare out contraband music to keep him sane. He didn’t mind the work, honest as it was. Mario appreciated he didn’t have to think too much about what needed doing, aside from lowering the pressure from time to time in some of the veins by turning valves at the end of connected passageways. Clogs came here or there in the lines, but he quickly got over shoving his whole fist into a squelching pile of shit. It felt good when he heard the sound of it clearing while he wiggled his arm elbow deep through the muck.

People might’ve looked down on it, but he felt a satisfaction on clearing out all the garbage that’d floated down from above.

Life down in the tunnels looked two dimensional, flat and endless. Shovel the shit and push it all downstream so the rest of it could come tumbling in from above.

This was vital to the survival of the districts, whether or not the people in the capitol or anyone else wanted to admit it. No one bothered to think about the work he was doing when they flushed, Mario imagined, because it was a weird mixture of shame along with the squeamish nature of it. The sewers had always gone on working thanks to people like Mario. Invisible to those who assumed they were entitled to him risking their life for all the shit they put him through (literally).

He saw it all in 3D: the cracks in the bricks along the wall, the gurgling brown water at his feet, or the endless entanglement of pipes at his sides and overhead.

Before long, the men topside would always radio him if there was an issue.

‘Hey! Super Mario,’ They’d call him, wunderkind of the sewers, ‘Got another spot for you to check.’

The tunnels were laid out in a grid pattern with color coordinated blocks through each shaft a person was traveling through. They used a double number system for main shaft ways and then their corresponding veins – 1-1, 1-2, and so on – the higher the number, the further away from the central facility.

“Here we go!” He’d radio back, already on the case.

Bowser gave the night shift folks a hard time. Whether out of a need for cruelty, or some outside pressure they weren’t privy too, he’d accuse them of being lazy, idiotic, or some combination of digs that amounted to too little work getting done a breakneck speed. Mario’s best friend Toad – nicknamed for the way his head looked too big for his neck, like a toadstool sticking out of his overalls – said that it was as central to their work as the darkness in the tunnels or the stench in the sewers. A man ready to put them down and debase the work they did because if he didn’t exist, they might’ve fully understood their worth.

Mario’s favorite part of the job was his midmorning break, when he’d come topside and trudge into the dimly lit break room to scarf down whatever scraps he’d packed into his tin lunchbox (anything with mushrooms, really). The others would be there to talk the usual trash, rubbing shoulders over how bad life was in the district, or to talk up their minor successes.

Most of it was about sex, because invariably it felt as though the only good thing they had in their lives was physical affection. You wouldn’t find stories of daring-do behind enemy lines, or those that’d cut off their arm for the capitol. The most they wanted was a little more than they had last year. As far as they could see it, they’d always been on the lowest rung of life, far away from whichever flag that might’ve fluttered overhead.

All those promises of a better world were based in a faith in one that none of them had ever seen.

They’d all been through darkness. They knew that what they could trust was what they could hold onto, not offers of something better. Especially when life would likely go on just as it always had for those shoveling shit day in and day out.

“I call her princess peach because of that ass, and how sweet she tastes,” Mario would tell them, one of the boys, because at seventeen he felt older than he was talking about sexual conquest. Not about the times Peach and he had laid underneath a set of stars in a rusted-out truck bed clinging to one another. How she made him feel safe, her arms wrapped around him, and his around hers. That no one else had him stop everything he was doing just to hear what she had to say, even if it was a complaint or diatribe about how her family would never understand her (he liked the way he nose crinkled when she got angry).

He promised that when he was old enough, he’d buy her a ring and they’d get a house big enough to be a castle for both of them.

They’d let him drink one of the beers they passed around the table in the break room, cheers him for his hard work, and talk about how they wished their sons had the sort of work ethic Mario had. They’d say no one was will to go as deep, or for as long, as Mario, the double entendre drawing a scatter of laughs, to which Mario would repeat, deep and long, eh? before taking another swig of beer.

On the walk home, he’d count the number of streetlights as they flickered alive. Shoulders heavy with exhaustion, he trudge along in his overalls and flick another song onto his walk-man, blasting heavy metal to stay awake. It felt good to be so tired at the end of the day. Even if no one else outside of their little group could recognize it, he’d accomplished far more than anyone else before the sun had even risen.

After he’d showered for the third time and crawled into bed next to his brother, Luigi, he’d do his best not to make the springs groan as he laid down.

‘You okay?’ Luigi would whisper, his little eyes wide as they’d look at his brother up and down.

“Go back to sleep, Lu,” Mario would snort. He’d turn back on his side and look over at his brother with a grin. “Yeah. Things are good.”