Vertigo River

Ever since the Fall of Industry, the Vertigo River was cleaning itself up. Along its banks, formerly the resting place of abandoned cars, kitchen appliances, and plastic bottles, now grew grass- tall pokey grass. The scavengers took the scrap long ago, picked clean the mud. A few years back the scavengers celebrated the three-hundred year anniversary that officially marked the end of the way things were, and the beginning of a new era. The so-called Scrap Age was born from the defunct factories of yesteryear. Ingenuity and thriftiness ruled, and the von Fixin de Hoolie household along the Vertigo River exemplified these noble attributes.
It's not that they kept a very clean house. How clean can a house made of dirt be, after all? They'd burrowed out a series of interconnected rooms in the tall banks of the Vertigo, packing the walls and floors very tightly with their hands and feet. No, it was their lack of stuff that was the saving grace of the von Fixin de Hoolie clan. They had a few things; Marylou had a knife, for example. She kept it in a pouch tied at her waist. It was rusty, but still sharp. Not bad for cutting root vegetables, or menacing would-be scavengers.
Marylou herself was impervious to pain and the cold and heartache. She liked it that way. In the winter she waded bare-foot through the water, at night she stood in the cold wind and felt the multitude of stars pressing down on her head like a crown of jewels. “Who gives a crap?” she thought to herself. She lived with her mother and five sisters, and the river was her highway and her home.