The Monty Short Story & Audiobook Series: Episode 11 - OOS-OOM!

OOS-OOM!

“I’m not paying for more bins,” Snort growled into his phone, “and that’s final!”

Monty and Plonk watched Snort angrily throw his phone into a pot of bubbling GreenGravy -*KERPLOP!* – before storming out of the kitchen. 

“He’s been arguing with MWM all week,” said Monty.

MWM stood for ‘Monster Waste Management’. Their job was to come round with their big trucks and empty the rubbish bins. Lately, however, the Inn had been making a lot more rubbish. MWM told Snort that if the Inn didn’t ‘get their rubbish problem sorted soon’, they’d refuse to touch the Inn’s bins.

Monty and Plonk looked out of the window. It was not a pretty sight. The four bins were overflowing with everything from banana peels to cheap, plastic noisemakers. Empty crisp packets floated nearby in gloppy pools of GreenGravy and sticky pools of Zingaling® soda. Paper napkins fluttered in tree branches. 

But how did things get so bad? Well, it used to be Monty and Plonk’s job to carry food scraps out to the pile every night. It didn’t take long for the food to turn into fertiliser for the garden. The pile also attracted charming little bird-monsters and adorable squirrel-monsters looking for leftovers to feed their families. Snort didn’t like that.

He said all leftovers should go straight into the bin from then on. This, of course, meant the bins filled up more quickly. Then, a week later, he heard Monty and Plonk giggling in the kitchen while doing the dishes. He found them making beards and hats out of bubbles.

“No wonder it takes you so long to wash the dishes!” he barked. “Well, from now on, there won’t be any more dishes! That should give you time to do your other chores!”

“What does that mean?” Monty wondered aloud.

The two boy-monsters soon found out.  Snort contracted with a company called Insta-Litter. All sorts of disposable items began arriving. Paper plates and cups replaced the china. Silverware made way for single-use ‘plasticware’. Snort ordered new dish towels, bath towels, pillowcases and nappies.

“No more laundering!” Snort exclaimed.

He couldn’t resist the deals on plastic kazoos, either. And plastic toy saxophones and plastic snow globes containing plastic models of the Gristling Inn.

“They’re so cheap, we can give them to special guests!”

With all this extra rubbish, the bins started overflowing. One strong wind sent litter scattering over the garden. Guests began to complain about the smell of rotting food. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the smell was attracting hedge-rats – goggle-eyed, slinky, spiky creatures that looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a rat. More and more of these monster-scavengers were showing up in the garden, making it rather unpleasant for the guests who liked to read or sunbathe there.

“It can’t go on like this,” whispered Beatrice, the receptionist, to Monty and Plonk one afternoon.

“And indeed it needn’t!” came a prim, pleasing voice out of nowhere.

Standing at the front door was a tall, cat-like monster wearing glasses and a smart suit. Snort appeared from the kitchen, wiping papaya-crab guts on his apron.

“May I help you?”

“Marla Shroud,” she said, presenting her business card. Snort read it with interest.

“‘Tip-Top Tip Solutions’?”

“Yes,” answered the mysterious cat-like lady. “I see you’ve got a bad case of RO – ‘Rubbish Overflow’. Also telltale signs of NB – ‘Nasty Bins’. I can take care of everything.”

Snort read out the letters at the bottom of her card.

“‘OOS - OOM’?”

“Out Of Sight - Out Of Mind!” answered Marla. “Hire me and you’ll never have to worry about your rubbish again!”

Snort shook her hand vigorously. “When can you start?”

“When you wake up tomorrow morning,” Marla replied, “all will be ready.”

As the sun rose on the Gristling Inn, the employees found a pillar installed in the back garden. A rope cordoning off the back half of the garden stretched from either side of the pillar, with a sign reading ‘Do Not Enter’. In the pillar was a chute door that folded down. According to instructions left by Marla, they just needed to toss their rubbish into the chute each night and, like magic, it would be gone! 

“She’s a wizard!” Snort exclaimed after a few nights. “It’s a magic chute!”

It certainly seemed so. The pillar wasn’t large enough to hold all the rubbish they were shoving through it, yet the back of the garden hadn’t even a trace of litter.

“But why does she need to cordon off the back half of the garden?” Monty asked.

“Ms Shroud explained she needed an area untouched by her clients for it all to work,” Snort replied. “Stop wondering and enjoy this litter-free, hedge-rat-free day!”

It was, indeed, a lovely spring morning, with puffy clouds against a blue sky.

“Those clouds look like a double-decker bus headed towards a pair of scissors!” said Plonk, his hamster teeth clicking.

Snort and Monty peered, but couldn’t quite see it. Plonk’s imagination could be quite vivid sometimes.

“Back to work!” Snort snorted.

For several days, Snort and the guests were happy not to have the eyesore of overflowing bins and the smell of mouldy food. The cordoned-off area was always perfectly tidy and debris-free. But as Monty was taking out the rubbish to the chute one night, he noticed several hedge-rats scurrying by his wheel.

That’s strange, he thought. They usually don’t appear unless rubbish has been sitting out for a while.

He also caught — when the breeze was just so — the whiff of something unpleasant.

“It’s coming from our neighbours!” insisted Snort. 

But it wasn’t just the smell and the hedge-rats that raised suspicions. As they gazed out of the window one morning, Plonk said, “Whoah!”

“What is it, Plonk?” asked Monty.

“Look! Those clouds look like a double-decker bus heading towards a pair of scissors. Like last week! What are the odds?”

This time, Monty could see it. And Plonk was right — the odds of clouds making the same shape on different days seemed very unusual.

“C’mon!” gestured Monty. “Let’s go check out that chute.”

Nothing seemed amiss in the garden. Monty, curious, tried to step over the rope cordoning off the rest of the garden.

*ZZZZZAT!*

A crackle of electricity ran up Monty’s wheel and made his body tingle unpleasantly. He opened the chute door.

“Monty!” Plonk cried out. “What are you thinking?!”

“I’m thinking I’m going to pretend to be a bag of rubbish and see where this chute takes me.”

Plonk gasped. “But what if it makes you disappear? Forever?!”

Monty considered this for a moment, but then decided to take his chances anyway. 

Plonk hoisted Monty up to the open chute door. Monty gulped. “Here we go,” he said nervously. Then he slid down the chute.

*THUNK*

Just a moment later, Monty found himself in the back of the garden, where he was met with heaps of trash, along with some hedge-rats looking sheepish and surprised by their new guest.

“I knew it!” said Monty. He put an arm up through the chute and called out, “Plonk! Pull me out! It stinks in here!”

When Monty was back on the other side, he told Plonk what he had seen.

“Ms Shroud must be using a spell to make it look and smell like an empty garden! But it’s all fake!”

When they told Snort what they had found out, he immediately called Marla to demand his money back.

“You said you’d make my trash go away!”

“No I didn’t,” said Marla, calmly. “I said I’d make it disappear. And I did! Remember? OOS-OOM.”

“Well,” said Snort, turning redder, “maybe it’s OOS, but it definitely isn’t OOM!”

After Marla dismantled her deceptive scenery, Snort begrudgingly called MWM to haul away all the rubbish. He then ordered Monty and Plonk to take the china and silverware out of storage. He was going back to how things were.

So the two monster-boys that night found themselves back at the kitchen sink, washing dishes and pretending to be old men and funny creatures with the bubbles. It’s a good thing that - at least for the moment – one of the things out of sight and out of mind was Snort.

The End