The phallic creature stood erect as the sun set. The moment the sun exited the hole and was replaced by the moon, the threads dug and curled underground to form a cage around the clam.

“Hi! I’m back!” The creature began waving its thin wispy threads around.

“Nothing like a nice big meal to fill you right up!” Suddenly the threads all shot up straight in excitement.

“I was just reading! Plenty of new things to refresh myself with! Humans are just so funny! Conflicts over what color they are hah! That book is a real treasure! Covers just about anything and everything! … Just not this dump…” The threads began waving around, stirring up dust and fogging up the entire room.

“Speaking of which the scheduled dump is coming soon! Absolutely can’t wait for that! Plenty of treasures to be found! Anyways let me show you my treasure!” As the threads coiled and looped around a chunk of concrete that was directly under the origin of the threads… “No! Where is it! Who took it!” It was revealed that there was an empty rectangular hole under the chunk of concrete lifted out. Within that hole, there was another circular hole which was where the thief entered and stole the book.

“Senny! Alejandros! Where’s my book!”

Nearby Alejandros with his newly colored shell skittered across the ceiling and almost fell down along with a piece of damp metal. Meanwhile, Senny bit and chewed into the concrete debris that was packed around the larger chunks to form an almost airtight wall.

Alejandros, fearing for his life, exclaimed “It was Jonathan! He did it! He took it and ripped it apart to decorate his home!”

“Why how? The whole bunker would’ve collapsed if he tried to come in! That meatball’s too fat to tunnel anywhere these days! You lie! Where’s my book!” The wisps of threads bunched together like cotton candy. “You’ve eaten it haven’t you!”

“Hang on! Hang on! We might get a book in this dump! You still have hope! Anyways haven’t you been looking at that old thing for several hundred days now!? You’ve probably memorized it with that big brain up top!” Skittering around in circles from the ground onto the ceiling, it maintained the same distance from the cloud of threads while at the same time relieving its nervousness.

“That’s still a loss! I’d have two books if that was the case! All for some extra pigments on your shell!” several threads burst out and struck the surrounding walls and ceiling, spraying dust everywhere.

“Hey! My shell is my pride!” The shelled creature stood indignantly, facing its shell to the ball of cotton candy.

“Whatever… I’ll just take the loss…” The ball of cotton candy began to droop down, collapsing until it was a flattened pancake of threads.

With that the concrete was about to slam upwards was put down, filling in the space it had left earlier. Dust plumed up and filled the air.

“How about I practice being a human! Can’t take away personal progress! It would be better than reading a book if I was able to participate in the book!” The pancake began to balloon upwards while keeping its solid surface. “They’re having a war too! It’ll be extra fun!”

With that statement more dust fell from the ceiling. “That must be the dump! Hah in my years here I’ve only found one book! I can’t wait to see the look on Alejandros’s face when he comes back with nothing! Hah!” The balloon began to pump its side in and out after.

--Outside--

Across the hills of the dump site, a curious little shelled creature scuttled across, darting into every possible crevice and back out again.

“Where is the book, I need the book. Otherwise bad things will happen to me. I’ll get killed when I bite him again. This is bad… What if I search on the surface of the pile. Surely I can spot the colors better if I search from there!” The little bug began to surface, bursting out of the ground like a bamboo shoot.

“No no no this isn’t working out. Maybe if I give him something other than a book… Maybe this?” Finding a curious piece of plastic which it had never seen before, it stopped its rush to circle around and observe it. “Aha! This should do!”

“This little thing which I’ve never seen before and therefore he hasn’t seen before! Almost exactly like him! What a nice sculpture! Hah I’m saved!”

Diving deeper into the mound of trash which only got taller since the trash was only dumped at one site was a difficult task especially after everything shook and fell and closed all the openings. Between scrambling through the thick dust which seemed to never settle and attempting to navigate around large pieces of junk, Alejandros decided to turn around and pop back out where he entered.

“Wait what? Where am I? Wait, I'm back where I started? What? How could this be? With my impeccable sense of direction I couldn’t have gotten lost!”

“Back into the pile I go again!”

“Aha! I found it! The pile of concrete! Almost solid! Luckily he has long legs to digest things! Nice and big easy target! Now I just gotta find the hole Senny made!” It hit a layer in which it turned from a random assortment of plastic to a consistent fine powder. Under the entire thing, it began skimming the top of the solid to find an entrance.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! I found something!” The shell creature burst in through the hole while holding the phallic object with its back two legs.

“Is it a book?” The ballon deflated and diffused to once more become a ball of cotton candy.

“Well… It’s better than a book! Look at this sculpture! A picture is worth a thousand words and a sculpture is worth a thousand pictures! This is basically a book! Aha!” The shelled creature passed the object under its body and between its legs before finally holding it up like a trophy with its front two.

“It’s just a petrified mushroom… Nothing new… Nothing unexpected… Whatever…” THe ball of cotton candy deflated once more to become a pancake.

“Wait what? You’ve seen it before? How could that be? This is special!” The cockroach waved around the object wildly.

“I read about it in the book dummy. Of course you wouldn’t know since you don’t read. Hah! You get the reason I read now!?” The pancake inflated once more to become a ball of cotton candy as it gloated.

“What reason? Don’t you just like staring at those colors?” The cockroach placed down the phallic object.

“What no! I’m learning! Do you even know as much as me!?” Threads burst out once more, stabbing into the walls.

“You read too much! It’s not fair! You’ve read that book hundreds of times!” The cockroach turned its back to the ball of threads once more.

“Hey! I only get barely ten minutes a day! You call that too much!? That’s barely enough! If I was topside I could read all day!” The ball of threads diffused a bit more and a dark object in the shape of the object the cockroach had brought in appeared.

“Yeah but we can’t go topside or else we’ll be captured! You saw what happened to Nicky!” The cockroach turned to face the ball once more.

“I know… but I’ve always wanted to…” The ball of threads compressed itself once more into a pancake.

“Yeah well we’re us and they’re them. They’ll never accept us. You know that.”

--Somewhere--

“Is that alive?”

“It’s certainly moving.”

“Could it be a drone?”

“That’s too big for a normal cockroach. I know that, therefore it couldn’t be a real cockroach.”

“Does that look like a drone to you?”

“Could any electronics survive the radiation levels in that place?”

“Well how do you explain it then?”

“Could be a military drone, testing electronics in high radiation levels.”

“The movement and coordination is too random to be a drone.”

“Well the landfill is technically a public space, we could go look at it.”

“Yeah go send someone to search and retrieve it.”