Pringle

The experts argued for weeks over his legal status. Barristers flocked from everywhere, desperate to put their name to the case of the century, the case that re-wrote the book. When the almighty stirring forces of the earth are responsible for a loss in human lives, it's called an act of God or Nature. The rules of homicide are well-defined in most cultures. Events such as those described below, however, blur the line between homicide and natural disaster, and turn the law on its head.

It was to the hollow, percussive thud of something being launched against the curb that I woke on the morning of Wednesday 21 August 2013. Begrudgingly I opened the curtains to look upon the happenings of the street, only to find I had been awoken at the early hour of 10.50am by the sound of the dutiful local waste collection experts, systematically emptying the blue recycling bins on my street with their usual, delightful rigour. Forgetting to robe myself properly, I scurried down the stairs and out the front door in my Futurama boxers to bring the container back to the front patio. To my dismay and confusion, I noticed that many of the contents I'd put out for them remained: two plastic egg boxes, two pots of Tesco value chocolate mousse, an empty jar of Morrisons mayonnaise, seven issues of Nuts magazine, and four plain-flavoured Pringles tubes. I stood befuddled in the street for what must have been minutes, the blue box swaying in the loosened grip of my hand while I pondered the situation. Was it something I'd done, a personal attack? Was there some beef I'd allowed to fester unknowingly between us? Perhaps it was the car battery I'd wired up to the bin handle as a simple assertion of myself as the new neighbourhood prankster? Surely not. A mistake was far more likely, that in a stupor of the wee hours, these poor, overworked civic labourers had simply made an error. Yes, that must be it, I told myself. Just a case of simple human folly. No matter, there's still enough room for next week's recycling.

Seven days later, I eagerly lifted my full bin out to the curb on a cool, twilighted September evening. I covered it with the small sheet of tarpaulin attached, noting the somewhat comical, yet disturbing, arrangement the recyclables inside had taken. With a greek yoghurt pot for a hat, two chocolate mousse pot eyes, an egg box for a torso, and the four Pringles tubes for arms, the items had come to resemble a charming, yet oddly disturbing little effigy. Chuckling to myself, I covered the box, attached the car battery (thinking to myself how much of a chuckle they'd get out of such a brilliant prank), and retired to my bedroom.

The next day, the waste disposal team returned at the unexpected time of 10.45am. I'd have to sort out my body clock if I was going to keep up with their forever-changing schedule. I opened the front gate and eagerly wandered up to the spot in the middle of the road where our hard working waste disposal team had left my recycling bin. Ignoring the horns of the traffic I was holding up, I lifted the tarpaulin and peered inside the blue box, keen to see my council tax money put to good use with the eagerness and enthusiasm of a young child on Christmas morning. However, my heart sank. To my dismay, there lay before me the same plastic effigy that had sat there the night before. My remaining back-catalogue of Nuts magazine had been hauled, but it simply wasn't enough. Holding back the tears, I peered across to the sight of a worker drop-kicking my neighbour's recycling bin to the curb, the contents exploding across the street. I attempted to muster the courage to confront him about the mistake, but the traffic had intensified and I was starting to shiver in my Thomas the Tank Engine boxers. I ran for the house, thrusting the blue bin against the wall with abandon.

I slammed the door shut and propped my back against it with a furious disillusionment. 'Does the council have something against the environment?' I asked myself. My train of thought was cut short by several raised voices now out in the street. Rushing outside to my front gate, I witnessed the horror. The same waste disposal expert I had almost approached, the drop-kicking expert, was now clumsily lurching through traffic blood sluicing down the nooks of his fluorescent hi-vis jacket, as his colleagues looked on in confused sedation. The sharpened Jaffa Cake tube that had lodged in his neck had severed the jugular vein, and the street stood still as the gurgles gradually fell silent. Feeling a tug on the breezy hem of my licensed cartoon boxers, I looked down to meet the chocolate mousse pot-stare of the mad, plastic abomination, smiling, winking a crinkled plastic wink at me, blood smeared up his Pringles pot limbs. I looked around to see if anyone was privy to what stood before me, only to find that the street was fully animated, a hoard of neighbours now tending to the bleeding man. A sharp wind blew, and I looked down to my side once more to find that the figure had vanished, with only a trail of bloody, circular footprints leading back to my blue plastic recycling bin.

I approached the blue bin and removed the lid to find that the figure, this aberrant assortment of plastic, had returned to a lifeless state, his chocolate mousse pot eyes staring vacantly skyward. My head span. How on earth could I explain this to the authorities? I pictured their jeering faces in some dark interrogation room as I tearfully described the events as I'd seen them. Fictional ramblings of an insane person. I returned inside, locked the front door behind me and collapsed.

The following week I implored the waste disposal experts to take my yoghurt pot for their own safety, only to be dismissed as an erratic loon who should learn to wear more clothes in public. Returning defeated to my front door, I froze on the spot, to the sound of someone choking. No, two people. I turned to the chaos in the street, although the plastic nightmare was nowhere to be seen, just the familiar circular, red footprints trailing back to my blue bin.

The autopsy reports revealed that the two workers' lungs had been stuffed with balled-up cheese wrappers. With witnesses confirming me as the last person to interact with the poor souls, and another murder happening in the same place the previous week, I was placed swiftly under arrest, and brought in for questioning. For thirty six hours they held me. The multiple blood types found on my patio made for compelling evidence. They insisted that there was something I wasn't telling them, and they were right. There was no way I could possibly share what I knew or had seen of Percival. How could they ever possibly believe it? I hardly believed it myself. Owing to a lack of evidence, I was released, placed under police monitoring for the next fortnight in case of any suspicious behaviour.

During those two weeks, I was approached twice by the police, asking why I'd not taken my recycling out. Fear of outside, I said. Which was true. The part I left out was my agonising fear of encountering Percival again and stirring up whatever forces had given rise to his being in the first place. When my surveillance was up, I became a shut-in. I took to spending time on the internet, more so than usual in my perpetual unemployed state. My face was in the papers after all. Who would hire me? I entered the words 'plastics achieve sentience' and then it all started to make a little more sense: pages on the occult, forums on cryptozoology filled with garrulous tales by the thousands of those who had attested to similar atrocities that I had witnessed. There were local news segments too, accounts from the farthest mountains to the driest deserts to the deepest jungles. Every time the story ended the same way, in the slaughter of an people or settlement. Many claimed it was a creature. Accounts of the creature's size and shape varied wildly between accounts, but they all seemed to agree more or less on the name, which would almost always translate to the plastic zombie. And in many cases, a phrase, written in Latin, was found nearby, scrawled in blood:

'Da plasticae vitam secundam'

A quick trip to Ask Jeeves translated this to:

'Give plastic a second life'

Sadly, what little coverage the mainstream media had given to these stories were dismissive, chalking up the graffiti to the work of underground syndicates of remorseful, naïve environmentalists. In many cases, authorities had pinned the murder (or murders) on an unfortunate encounter with local flora and fauna and whenever that was possible, they usually framed some poor local scapegoat, with the circumstantial evidence brushed under the carpet. Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole I went, following blue Wikipedia link after blue Wikipedia link, feeding both my own insatiable curiosities and fears. And then, pay dirt, in the cold light of an early Tuesday morning. Dr Edwina Marrow was her name, and the theory had cost her both her career, and ultimately her life. Dr Edwina Marrow had theorised that plastics contained extant genetic materials that could be brought back to life. Decaying prehistoric life withstands thousands of years of pressure underground in order to become the fossil fuel needed for modern day plastics. If these plastics are left to stagnate for long enough, the residual genetic material can come back to life when just the right level of electrical impulse is applied.

Oh no, the car battery. Christ, would they hold me responsible? How is any of this even possible? I was swimming in too many thoughts. I'd been awake for more than three days and I needed sleep.

I awoke in a daze a few hours later to the familiar sound of the rubbish truck. The bin! In an attempt to overcome my worsening agoraphobia, the night before I had dropped it off on the curb. However, I'd rigged it up to the battery by force of habit in a state of exhaustion. I darted to the front door to stop the madness, but the massacre was already taking place. I counted seven figures in the road in a wild frenzy of blood and fluorescent yellow. One was still alive, struggling for breath as the plastic beer can holders around her neck tightened. A frantic police officer chased the plastic abomination through traffic as I stood helpless in the front doorway of my house. I broke down, sobbing into oblivion, cursing whichever higher or local power that could allow so much blood to be shed. As I finally read the words scrawled in blood across the side of the rubbish truck, my head span:

'Da plasticae vitam secundam'

The claps of gunfire, march of the Swat teams and click of handcuffs was all barely noticeable as I collapsed to the floor.

It didn't take long for my name to be crossed off the list of suspects. In the papers, they said that a local Tory council member had been taking a leisurely Wednesday morning fox hunt in a nearby forest when he overheard the cries of help from people in the neighbourhood. The shots had pierced straight through Percival's legs, permanently crippling him. He was alive, however, and within the week was in court. He spoke for the first time in his croaky plastic voice and addressed the room, the audiences on the live stream and the world, although the interpreter spoke on his behalf. Percival's only wish was to die. He said that nothing should live forever and that by refusing to recycle him, he had been forced into an inescapable purgatory under a veil of blue tarpaulin, forever hoping that the shadows cast on it were those of our local rubbish collectors, ready to eagerly pass him on from this life to the next.

The judge found Percival guilty of all charges. By court order, he was sent to the incinerator the next morning. It appears Stirling Council still doesn't know how to properly dispose of plastics.

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