I stop digging as one of the older children approaches me. She hands me a bleached pelvis, stark and white in the filth that covers everything on the landfill.
The kid asks if this is old Oliver Bone-Ass?
The name sends a chill down my spine. It is a name I have not heard uttered from the living in an age. They show me other artefacts they have dug up from his burial mound. Bearing his brand on it. The kids don’t mind looting his grave, the dead had more than enough possessions in my time. So many that they spilled over into this time.
I try to explain that Oliver Bone-Ass wasn’t a great man, but a corporation bearing the name of a man, selling homewares to bored commuters. They struggle with this concept. So for the rest of the morning I ask them to bring me all the products that they find on the landfill with Oliver Bone-Ass’s brand on them.
They bring me plastic studded cushions that say LOVE on them. A polyester top that looks almost new. It even has its label intact. It boasts it is three percent cotton. A travel diary dates the haul from 2025. I can still make out the legend Positive Vibes Only etched in its plastic cover.
By the time we break for lunch, I have so many LOVE cushions that I make a desk from them and stand behind it in character. I hold my hands out to them. One of the little ones, entranced by the show, brings me something she has pulled from the layers of landfill beneath our feet.
“A light up Prosecco Time decanter? That will be forty-four ninety-nine.”
I place the item in an Oliver Bonas Forever Bag and hand it back to her.
They get the game.
“A usb disco ball. Turning your phone into a party are we, sir?”
“Plastic pineapple shaped fairy lights for indoor use only.”
A child brings me a cheap necklace with a diamond skull hanging from it. They hang it around my neck and I cry. It is silly. I am over this. I kick the pillow fort cash register over. The kids don’t know what to say. Is this part of the game? One of the older kids breaks the spell, holding up the pelvis and chasing the littler kids around with it, shrieking, I am Oliver Bone-Ass. You have disturbed my sleep.
One of the kids picks up a cushion with an H on it and hits him with it. Everyone grabs a cushion and soon the air is alive with words shouted and thrown. H—O—M—E. I try to protect myself with a single-use commuter umbrella, but it just makes me a target. Cushions rain down on me like pennies on the eyes of rich old Oliver Bone-Ass, until I too am laughing. I don’t even mind when one of the plastic studs draws blood on my cheek.
I rise to my feet and round on the young man with the pelvis.
“Curse you Oliver Bone-ass. Back to your forever grave!”
We chase him and we catch him and we jump on his pelvis and grind the brittle bone into dust until all is as it should be again.