My garbage disposal is speaking to me.
It started small. A bubbling, a gurgling. Noises that could be explained by the dishwasher or suds of my leftover soap.
Then the gurgling took on a pattern. She started playing my favorite songs. A new radio hit just for me, once a week, in her own garbage disposal language.
I told no one.
I would come down to make my nightly tea and she’d be there waiting for me, always open—that dark, unblinking eye at the bottom of my shining sink.
A garbage disposal is beautiful, don’t you think? Most people assume there are sharp blades just below the surface, chumming up your food like a blender. But the reality is much more sophisticated. A garbage disposal is a spinning platform that tosses your unwanted, rotten trash into its side walls, shredding it into small bits with its rough surface before sending it down the pipe.
A garbage disposal would never hurt me. My garbage disposal wouldn’t do that.
At night, I started giving her gifts.
I would cook her things—lasagna, stew, sourdough bread. Leftovers were nonexistent in my household. With two hungry teenagers and my mouth of a husband, all plates were clean by the end of the night.
So I started saving my meals for her.
I’d eat a bite or two here and there to avoid suspicion, just enough to keep up my strength. But the vast majority of my food went to my disposal.
At first, she rewarded me. She’d whisper sweet nothings into my ear, predict little things about the future.
“You will find twenty dollars on the ground at the grocery store,” and I would. “Your son will make the track team,” and he did.
For her efforts, I started making her desserts. Pie, cake, crumble, flan. She preferred chocolate desserts, just like me.
One day I came downstairs and the sink was alive. Ants—hundreds of them—squirming around our kitchen, desperate for sugar or water or shelter. I hadn’t cleaned her well enough the night before. I had gotten lazy. I had taken her for granted.
Her lips, sticky with frosting, attracted the ants overnight. I sprayed them with poison and washed them down the drain, churning up their fragile little bodies with my disposal.
She didn’t like that.
Her demands became greater. More food, more treats, larger helpings. I had to start sneaking portions from my husband, then my children. I stopped sleeping, staying up late to bake trays of fudge and batches of brownies that I’d lovingly hand-feed her, piece by piece. For my efforts, I was rewarded with predictions of grandeur. “In one year, you’ll inherit massive amounts of wealth.” I learned of an old, sick uncle on my father’s side.
In May, my family and I went on vacation. I tidied up the kitchen, gave my disposal an extra big meal, and kissed her goodbye. I told her how long we’d be gone and when we’d be back. Our neighbor was tasked with coming over to water our plants, but I couldn’t figure out a way to ask him to feed my disposal. So I didn’t.
She was angry when we got home. We had only been gone for five days—the long weekend, with an extra day on each side—to visit the beach. The kids got to unwind, my husband and I got to reconnect. But always, in the back of my mind, I thought about her.
I apologized to her that night. I fed her crème brȗlée, an entire steak, a glass of wine. She gave me the cold shoulder. I was devastated.
My husband started to worry about me. He only noticed when it affected him, like when dinner was late or he couldn’t fuck me because I was so tired from my nightly rummagings in the pantry. He began asking questions. “Why do I hear the disposal on so late? Why aren’t you sleeping anymore?” My disposal didn’t like that either. Her first demand after we got home was to see how far she could push me. She told me to feed her my husband’s contact lenses, without which he was half-blind.
My husband, stumbling around the house, searching for his lenses that had already been ground into fine dust. My disposal, chuckling to herself, letting me in on her private joke.
Her predictions became darker. “You will get in a car accident today on your way to the store.” I got into a fender bender. “If you speak about me to anyone, your children will die.” I stopped leaving the house. I got my groceries delivered, ordering five, seven, ten bags at a time. I became her full-time personal chef. I learned how to make coq au vin, soufflé, and crȇpes, giving her five-course dining experiences every night. I stopped eating. I was unwell. Still, she wanted more.
I came up with a plan.
If I could wear down my disposal by breaking her teeth or jamming up her insides, maybe she’d stop speaking to me. Stop demanding things from me. I could finally have my life back. But I could tell no one.
I started feeding her starch. Rice, egg shells, cooked noodles, whole potatoes. Bit by bit, she moved more and more slowly. Her predictions became inaccurate. “Your dog will get sick today,” but he didn’t. “Your husband’s going to leave you,” but he stayed. Her voice became slurred.
On Monday, my blessed Monday, I went to feed her breakfast and the kitchen was silent. I flipped her switch. Her motor whirred, struggled, whined. She had been gummed up. I was free.
For two weeks, I lived my life again. I took my children to school. I ate takeout instead of cooking at home. I slept. I fucked my husband. I enjoyed my life the way it was meant to be enjoyed—without her in my ear.
I became complacent.
On my seventeenth day without her, she started again. She whispered my name in the kitchen. I plugged my ears with cotton. She yelled louder.
“Mom, the sink is making a weird noise.” My daughter, my sweet Annabelle, making herself breakfast. “Do you hear that? It sounds like a song I heard the other day.”
I struck a deal with her, my disposal. She would leave my children alone, and I would fix her.
It took hours.
I flushed her with warm water. I gave her soap, degreaser, lube. I unhooked her pipes and carefully cleaned out her clog with a wire brush. I wept.
For my transgression, I was punished. Instead of food, my disposal now demanded pieces of me. A lock of my hair, clippings from my fingernails, the flakes of skin I took off my feet with my exfoliating brush. She wanted more.
First, she told me to cut off my eyelashes. My lids, naked and pink, fluttered as I watched my hands sprinkle the sparse hairs down my disposal.
Then she asked for my eyebrows. She let me shave instead of pluck—I asked. My now alien-like form shoved these down my disposal without another thought. The hot water I ran scalded my hands raw.
Then she demanded my pubic hair. At this, I sobbed.
I bent over at the waist in my shower, slowly dragging the razor down my mound and across my lips. With every swipe, I scraped the razor into my palm, collecting each hair for her. I didn’t notice the water turning red, the slice of my razor too quick on my delicate labia.
After, I rubbed lotion on my bare lips and listened to my disposal churning my offering in her stomach. She was happy.
I knew it was coming—what she wanted from me, at the end. Yet still, I resisted.
She told me what she needed and I stalled for days. I held her off with other bits of me: my toenails, my nose hairs, a soaked tampon. It wasn’t enough.
That fateful day, a Tuesday, my daughter—my beautiful daughter—came to me with a question.
“Mom? Can you hear the disposal too?”
Horrified, I looked at Annabelle—truly looked at her—for the first time in weeks. Her under eyes were dark and splotchy. Her cheeks were sunken in. Her elbows stuck out like points against her torso.
“Sometimes she tells me to . . . do things.”
I seethed. My disposal hadn’t kept up her end of the deal. She was punishing me again, taunting me with her hold over my family.
“Mommy will take care of it. Of everything.” I kissed my sweet child’s head and sent her to sleep.
My disposal wanted my feces. My excrement. She wanted everything that I expelled out of my body. She wanted all of me.
At three o’clock that morning, I took her my offering. Sealed in plastic tupperware, I had prepared her meal just right. My stool was hard from malnutrition and stress, but it was ample. I knew she would be pleased.
Gently, I flipped on her switch and ran cool water down her throat. Her unblinking eye, ever-watching, stared back at me.
I unclasped the lid of my tupperware and slowly tipped it over her mouth. The smell was as rotten as my insides.
She churned, slowly at first, then quickly and with fervor. My disposal loved my offering.
I knew she would.
Once she was finished, I sat beside her on the kitchen floor. We were both silent. Then, a noise. Faint laughter, followed by a bellowing guffaw. My disposal was laughing at me. After everything I had done for her.
Quickly and without thinking, I grabbed the wooden broomstick out of the pantry. With her laughter ringing in my ears, I turned my disposal back on and shoved the broomstick down her throat. She choked, coughed, and sputtered, but I kept ramming that stick into her gullet.
Finally, I turned her off and laid on the kitchen floor to sleep.
My husband found me two hours later when he came downstairs to go to work. I couldn’t explain to him why I was lying naked in the kitchen, nor could I tell him why I had done what I had done to the disposal. But when he offered to fix it, I told him that under no uncertain circumstances should he or the children touch her.
We had the disposal removed. I knew she was dead when she let my handyman take her.
My disposal would have never allowed such a thing.
I kept a close eye on Annabelle after that night. Once, I asked her what the disposal had told her to do. She laughed and said, “Oh, I was probably just imagining things. I was so stressed with school, you know. It was nothing.” She eats well for her age and sleeps soundly through the night.
Occasionally, I wake up and go down to the kitchen when the house is quiet. Where my disposal used to be sits a vacant hole, an open drain with no teeth. I only miss her sometimes.
None of the other kitchen appliances speak to me.
Last week, though, I swear I heard my husband’s bandsaw whispering to me from the garage.
Hannah Madden (she/her) is a Portland-based embroidery artist and writer. When not creating thread-based art, she can be found curled up with a good book or crafting eerie stories of her own. Living in a century home with her husband and her dog, she draws inspiration from the spooky atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest. Hannah is always on the lookout for new ways to blend art, writing, and her fascination with the macabre.
