Happy Shack pt. 1

A rough beginning to a short story that's been bouncing around in my head for about a year now...

3.4.11- Edited. I added the last paragraph. Helps explain the worlds a bit better.
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Happy Shacks on the lower levels look just like Happy Shacks at the upper levels. Same immaculate white light, soft, no shadows. Same white paper hats, same white teeth gleaming from behind mechanized smiles. You’d think the dreck showers would dull that gleam, but nope. Happy Shack remains unblemished and the whites stay white.


Outside the Happy Shack, that’s when you start to see a difference. Down here, if you weren’t a  bottom feeder, you probably wouldn’t recognize one, even if you were standing right on top of it. Us litter rats know where to look. You follow the canals, the trenches, you follow the greenish-yellow glow of the exhaust vents, you follow that unmistakable smell of salty, grilled protein plucked out from hundreds of odors of decomp. I tell you, you can’t beat a bottom-feeders olfactory system. It’s a thing of pride down here! The upper level Happy Shacks gleam so white, they can blind a fellow. That actually might not be true, but I’ve heard stories. One thing’s for sure, there’s no way one of them high-and-mighty’s got half the sniffer as me and my boys.

The lower you get, the more the dreck becomes part of you. The trash tossed on the upper levels, lands here--or some part of it at least. Let’s say some chubby-chub rich lady up on Level 1, after wiping her bottom with an endangered squirrel, purchases herself a grand piano. Now I know what you’re saying. A piano? Fat chance finding one of those on this floating desolation-burge, but I know for a fact they’re up here. So eventually this Plump Polly gets sick of her piano, maybe she needs room for a new Atmos-bed. She doesn’t want to deal with the hassel of selling the thing, so she has her mech pitch it off the level. A humanitarian gesture really, because down it falls until a couple hundred feet later, crash! Thing’s caught by the first net at Level 6. By now it’s pretty beat up. Doesn’t play. Level 6 skimmers strip down, use some strings, some wood. Maybe they make a piece of furniture. A bench. What’s not needed gets tossed down level. Eventually, the bench breaks, and it gets tossed too. Level 7 takes what they want, pitches the rest. The ripping apart. The rebuilding. A piano plummets two thousand feet and slowly disintegrates, level by level until the point of nothing. Until dust. Until the Untouchables.