Trash

It is dark and cavernous down here. A sliver of momentary bright daylight each time someone throws a bottle, a bag, or an empty soda can down through the swinging drum lid up above. And then the junk drops down with a dull metallic echo that sounds throughout the vast midnight chamber below. Clatter, clang, and then a soft thud as it lands amongst the rest of the trash somewhere to his right.

In the darkness, he wades through the torn trash bags and rotting fruit and junk mail. He sits down and picks through one of the piles, feeling his way through the wads of wet paper and sharp-edged broken plastic. Or are they shards of a shattered mirror? It is difficult to tell by touch alone. It is difficult to know where he left something, once he has put it down. The steel chamber seems endless. He has only ever found one of the four walls in his meandering days down here. He has long since grown used to the smell. Or perhaps, completely lost his sense of smell. He has long since grown used to the darkness, too. At times, he becomes unsure whether his eyes are open or closed, and he has to put fingertips to his eyelids to know.

Up above, he hears a noise. A large truck. But it does not rumble past like usual. Instead, it pulls up outside. A loud, insistent beep-beep-beep echoes down the shaft and bounces off unseen metal walls. Out there, above somewhere, things starts to whir and groan. And then the container starts to rumble and shake. He can feel it lift, as if pushed from below, out of the ground and up into nothingness. He falls backwards — something pierces through a bag into the flesh of his forearm. He rolls over and gets up on his hands and knees, steadying himself amidst the piles of rolling garbage as the great container sways from side to side. And then, a sliver of light — not from above but from somewhere below.

The operator had pressed the button that releases the large butterfly doors at the bottom of the refuse container. The steel doors fly open, and the rotten contents captured inside spill out into the bed of the old garbage truck. The great metal box dangles from the loader crane that is mounted on the truck’s back. The trash rolls out of it and spills into the light. And with the refuge, he also falls through the clear, crisp air and and lands hard on the heap. He rolls down the slope of garbage and off the side of the truck and hits the tarmac below. The truck keeps beep-beep-beeping. He can hear the container rattle, suspended somewhere in the sky. The beeping stops and grows quiet again. Metal scrapes as the trash container submerges again. The truck’s engine roars to life, and the old, grumbling machine pulls away to empty the garbage from a bin at the corner of the next block.

He lies there for a second, left behind, blinded by the light. Even though it is cold and overcast, the clouds above look luminous to his unaccustomed eyes. He gets to his feet, unnerved by the steady ground beneath him. The cold, fresh air stings his nostrils. It burns as he takes a deep breath and lets his chest expand and fall, expand and fall. He turns towards the sidewalk. He sees that the only part of the vast waste container visible above ground is a small, squat trashcan with a round swiveling mouth, unassumingly mounted on a square steel platform flush with the pavement. It is this trashcan that opens into that large, buried chamber below, the steel vessel that sits deep in the darkness collecting the cans and milk cartons and bags of dog shit that the people passing by throw down. A swish of the lid and it disappears, like magic, below. Clatter, clang, thud.

He walks over to the trashcan and casually swings the drum lid a couple of times. He peers down inside and, for a second, considers climbing in through the gaping mouth and tumbling back down into the warm stench of the chamber, back into the dark belly that lies below the sidewalk. But, now emptied, he realizes he’d hit the hard bottom without anything to cushion his fall. He shakes himself off like a wet dog, letting pieces of lettuce and clumps of spoiled yogurt fly from his hair and into the air and onto the ground and against the metal surface of the bin. And then he walks off down the street, only a little bit unsure as to where he is going or what he will do once he gets there.

#46 It’s the first time in (how long has it been?) almost a year that I’ve uploading a story here. 2025 was just too exhausting and left me somewhat drained. Although I hope to slowly come back to regularly writing and getting back into a creative rhythm.