Taking Out the Trash

by David Gibbs / DavidGibbs6

Matt woke to the sound of the garbage truck. He had overslept again but he was up now and rushing out the front, still in his underpants. Stumbling on the uneven surface, he staggered and had to let his eyes adjust. Craning his neck he looked skywards to see where the trucks were dumping.

It was imperative he knew where the latest dump was happening. Closer was better but also not too close, the last thing he needed was a stinking pile of whatever next to his man cave. Worse still, had he slept through the dump, he might have found himself trapped under a stinking pile of whatever.

Today the dump was a fair way off so he would have to hike to reach it. Grumbling, he sauntered back inside to get dressed, pull on his trash boots and grab his rake. It was going to be a shitty day, he could already tell. The music player was running low on battery but all the new types weren't compatible with his current one. It was going to be a miracle if he could find anything new with a decent song on it, even if it did have enough charge to play it.

By the time he was getting close to the dumping ground, Matt had talked himself around and was feeling decidedly more upbeat. His hangover was feeling a little better, possibly due to his breakfast of hair of the dog: some cheap half cask wine. Light trash had blown through the gully, covering everything and made for easy walking. He only had to stop once to unhook his racket boot from some random do-flicky.

By the time he arrived he was feeling hungry as a gull and the first point of order was to find the food dumps. Mostly it was half eaten meals from restaurants, which required some sorting and definitely a selective touch. There was always plenty of food, it had just taken some getting used to. After turning over wet piles of kitchen scraps, he had unearthed a couple of tins of fruit and enough old flour to make some pancakes later. He had a good stash of bottled water and a sturdy camp stove back at the cave. There was no shortage of pans to cook on either, although most were missing teflon.

After stashing the supplies, peeling and eating some of the vegetables, Matt began to explore the other trash. Much of it was industrial, broken tiles, boards with nails, that kind of stuff. Every so often it would be the remnants of people's lives. The things they kept in the garage clogging up space. That is until the new person they are, had lost the connection to the person they were, just enough to throw a bunch of stuff away. These were the dumps Matt loved the most. They were full of nostalgia, like digging up time capsules, or exploring a hidden trove.

Mostly it was trash however. Much of it broken in the fall to the dump, or impossibly caught up under an immovable deluge of stuff. Sometimes he would spend the better part of an hour digging and fighting to free something that looked promising. Only to find it fatally destroyed or unworkable. He piled up pieces of stuff hoping to one day find the parts to make something useful out of it. But with so much trash and the shifting landscape it was hard to keep track of it all. Long ago Matt stopped looking for a pair of shoes and now just wore the two best ones he found, melting the soles onto old tennis rackets.

The man cave was a godsend for sure. It had been an old bus but for whatever reason, it had ended up here instead of the scrap center. Finding it had been the thing that had pulled him out of a major depressive slump. It was half full of paper litter when he came across it. There were no windows to keep it all out. That had been an easy fix. Large flat cardboard was enough to stop light rubbish. Within a week the drift had moved across it and Matt had packed enough cardboard and dry waste along the outsides that it was well sealed and insulated. Another month and it was a proper cave under a small hill of waste.

It had taken longer still to find the tools needed to remove the unwanted seats and reposition the remaining ones into a useful configuration. Having a place to store the things he found was life changing. No longer having to rely on a daily food dump, he could store some foods, keep track of tools and pile up batteries for the small devices that often still worked. He never much cared for appearances but it was nice to clip the beard and stop it from becoming too overgrown. Having a pile of trimmers was good for that and when one stopped working he could just throw it out the door.

He only vaguely kept track of time, mostly by keeping a stash of other people's documents. But this only gave him a rough idea of what month of the year it was. The days of printed news and receipts were long gone, even books were scarce. He had a few on a makeshift shelf in the man cave, but reading wasn't really his thing. A few pages in and he was so bored that he put them back on the shelf. Most of Matt's reading was other people's mail, he opened it whenever he came across it and read it for curiosity's sake. Most of the stash he kept was out of a vague interest and for the dates It was nice to know some people had bigger issues than he did.

The sun beat down on him from above and it suddenly felt quite warm. He hadn't thought to bring a hat this morning and he had been poking about the trash for more than half the day already. Matt decided it was a good time to head to the beach, maybe he would find a hat on the way there. Downing the other half of someone's bottled water and tossing the empty over his shoulder, Matt started off for the west wall.

He called it the beach because of the massive amounts of micro plastics that were almost like sand. Matt wasn't sure if it was where the broken down plastic gathered, or if a large industrial dump had made the beach. The wind seemed to tunnel along the giant wall, sweeping the usual bags and various papers away. They flew over the undulating dunes that drifted away from the wall. Along the edge it was nice to walk on and the shade from the wall kept his head from baking in the sun. He had to be careful of soft spots but it kind of added to the adventure. Many times he had fantasized about scaling the wall and leaving this all behind but it was just a fantasy. The wall was immense and the sides smooth, there was nothing to hang onto. Also he had no climbing experience and no gear of any kind that could even make a dent in the damn thing.

Off to the east the drone trucks finished for the day as the shadow from the wall began to stretch out further. Matt could head directly for home from here but with the changing landscape it was easy to get lost in the dump. Best to backtrack and avoid missing the cave, even with the flag he had planted, it would be easy to walk past the hill and not even recognise it from a slightly different angle. With a swig of some leftover cask wine, he made off.

He was almost back to today's dumping coordinates when a different noise seemed to fill the waste dump. At first it seemed to come from everywhere and Matt stared into the sky searching for it.

He didn't expect it over the west wall, most trucks came from the north. When the massive helicopter appeared over the wall the sound intensified, bouncing around as if flew over him. It hovered briefly for a minute and for the briefest moment Matt thought it might finally be a rescue mission. His hopes rose as it lowered a large dark platform on a massive chain and he almost fell in his excitement as he started to run towards the would be rescuers.

Shouting wildly he whooped and plodded as fast as he could over the trash in a half stumble half jog. Keeping his eyes on the ground being careful not to fall, he didn't see the first of the metal, clatter onto the giant disk as the copter started to pull away from him. By the time he glanced up it was further away from him than before and it dawned on him that this wasn't a rescue. He stopped and stared in awe as the giant magnet reclaimed buried metal, sucking it out of the dunes and into the air. It flew up sticking to the ever growing ball of scrap. Tin cans, old chairs, even old white goods, sucked skyward to join the exodus.

Another minute passed before the dread hit Matt, he started to run again, his mind racing faster than his feet. The man cave, it was a bus, a metal bus, was it too big for the magnet. Desperately he willed the chopper to change course or to fill up and leave, he didn't want to know if it was too heavy or not, almost everything he owned was on that bus. He could see the cave entrance now, and the makeshift lean to keep it from being buried. Already could see the recovery unit was going to miss it. The magnet was a good distance away from it, but still it sniffed out the metal and swung on the heavy chain. It pulled towards the bus like a junkyard dog trying to eat an intruder. The chopper groaned in protest before pulling the giant ball away and back on course. Swaying like a pendulum, it continued on its path.

Matt stopped to catch his breath, watching it go as he did. That had been close. Far too close. In the years he had lived here there had never been such a thing. Why now? And how could he protect the cave against that?

He was thinking about maybe filling the bus with as many heavy concrete chunks as he could find, when the chopper banked and started back. The adrenalin which had hardly had time to recede, was spiking again, making Matt's heart flutter. Powerlessly he watched as it got closer and closer. Without thinking about the dangers of being dumped with several tons of recovered steel, Matt started to run again. Desperately he tried to reach his home. His lungs hurt and he fumbled, tripping on something buried in the paper, falling face down. Scrambling, he tried to get up but it was already too late. The bus rose from the hill, pulling packed trash up with it and leaving a crater in its place.

For a moment Matt thought the bus was going to fall as it hovered, barely holding to the magnet. He hit the deck again, half expecting to feel the crushing weight of the bus come down atop him. But it passed, a swirl of light trash blowing past him as it did. Matt would have given chase too, but he couldn't, it just wasn't in him. The adrenalin was still there, but the will had gone. For the first time in a long time, he let the feelings he pushed down constantly, to bubble back up and overwhelm him.

In the five years since Matt's wife had pushed him down the garbage chute, he had managed to keep it together. He was determined to not let it, or to let her, get to him. That determination was gone now, replaced with a sadness, frustration and anger. So much anger.

Matt screamed abuse repeatedly at the world but the sound didn't carry well, it was absorbed and dissipated by the trash. He screamed anyway, until finally his voice gave out.