The Garbage Man

He moves through the barren streets on legs that refuse to give out, feet tapping on the pavement in uneven patterns of one, two, one…..two, onetwoonetwo, one, two. His excitement grows at each passing pile of waste, and he cannot help but be born again every time he finds a dirty old towel.

This one smells of blood, freshly stained and blooming from the center like the fire he lit in last night's trash can. It couldn’t have been fatal, not with the jagged off-white edges still peeking through. Finally, he thinks, a treasure that stinks of life.

Reverently, he places it within his heavy duty trash bag and continues on in the everlasting twilight. He could’ve been the last man, he could’ve been the first. Dragging along all the lives of those that came before him, the trash man found in himself an echo of God, but he had always despised the naming of it.

His left leg starts to ache again, and he finds a nice pile of trinkets to rest by. These are covered in dust, and much like the rest of the world, look as though they had been put here to die by hands who had nothing left to lose. He carefully picks up an old rusted locket shaped in the shadow of a heart. A shadow, he thought, of what it must have once been.

He takes the bent end of some half formed nail clippers and gently pries it open. She blooms for him, and his eyes water at the image she reveals. Inside, spared the harshness of the world, is the pristine picture of a mother and daughter. Well, almost pristine. The mother’s face had been scratched out rather halfheartedly, but the lines were placed in such a deliberate X that the man knew it had not been accidental.

Grief, thought the garbage man, it must have been grief. The world as it was now held no room for missing mothers, and he doubted any children could survive long with such a heaviness still tucked in their hearts.

He attached the locket carefully around his own neck. This is what he was made for. The grief was now his to hold, another swarth of his great blankness wiped away.

The throbbing in his leg had subsided, and he knew he had found what he was meant to in this stretch of desolation. Now, west. He could feel it buzzing in his skin. West is where he must go.

The necklace bounced like an echo against his skin as he walked on through the desert cliffs. The horizon danced like a painting, and he imagined a great hand reaching down from the sky to feel it’s many jagged edges and textured valleys. He closes his eyes and runs his fingers through the warm sand, wondering at the place where such a hand might come from.

Many days and nights of silent walking brings him to the remains of a disarrayed town. He tries hard to look away from the signs on store windows, and instead takes the back alleys and unpaved roads. Smoke hangs in the air, and he dares to venture outside the comfortable caves of forgotten streets to find its source.

He watches behind brick as a group of men, boys really, watch the burning body shrinking into itself. They leave as the fire reaches its peak, faces shielded with careful indifference. The man cannot help himself from drifting with the wind towards the gruesome scene.

He chases the smoke around its source, holding a rag to his mouth and shielding his eyes from the sting. On the ground, pieces of clothing are torn into jagged strips. Her underwear weeps with drops of blood and soot from atop a stick planted like a flag in the cracked pavement.

He is glad for her safety in the fire, which holds her close like a babe in its mothers womb. No one will touch her now that a dragon erupts from her every pore. Flames billow smoke like the roar of an angry mob, silky hands reaching for the throat of God in his high chair. They will reach him, the garbage man knows, they will pull from his mouth a confession written in the tears of mothers who cry for him to bring them a baby boy. The same mothers who spit back at him his cruel irony when life invades between the legs of their little girls.

The man turns away. It is not his place to grieve, this he knows. With his heavy step and burly frame, this is not his horror to hold. Still, he cannot help himself from kicking down the pathetic stick with a brief moment of hatred washing across his face. He returns to his native blankness only after laying down an old kitchen knife in its place. On he walks, letting the shifting air remind him he’s alive.

That night, the trash man does not let himself sleep. He stays awake through crusted eyes and tired limbs, keeping close watch on the carefully crafted spectacle he has become. Walking away had cost him much. Thoughts and feelings of his own bubbled to the surface and he could not help but stare at himself through the tired eyes of all those he had wrapped himself away in over the years.

The girl had shaken him, the way he knew deep in that part of himself that he could not take this from her. He carried pain, he carried heartache and joy and the way that thousands of lives could become one great accusing eye staring back at itself. He carried mothers and children and loss and hope in the billowing black bag which he dragged across the ruins of humanity. And yet, all of the stories he had molded himself into fell away at the sight of that great and ruinous flame.

He could never know the pain of her. It ate at him in every step that this was someone he had no right to become. Who was he if not everything? If not everyone he weaved into the frail little threads of himself? Bubbling up to his temples, these questions spilled out of his eyelids in great gushing droves.

The trash man, the garbage man, the keeper of everyone past, yet inside of him was still a single lonely boy. All he had ever wanted was to become another drifting grain of sand in the fury of an unthinking desert storm.

In his head, he saves the girl. He saves her over and over again because he could not become her. He throws rocks and brandishes swords and yells with such fury that the boys stumble over each other to run away. He holds her close and weeps with her, he eats with her, he walks with her, he tells her about each and every treasure he carries with him. In his dreams she loves him for it.

Every night she lays with him he leaves a new piece of trash to bake in the desert sun. He closes his eyes and pictures her there next to him, smiling as she holds his hand. The next morning, his bag seems heavier with her face gone from his mind's eye.

Slowly, he drops from himself every beaming proof of life he had before held in unending reverence. They mean nothing when he realizes that becoming her means becoming those who had set her gentle body alight in the first place. He looks at each of his items and wonders for the first time who has really touched them. He despises them now for the stories they can never tell him, for the hands that have used them for hidden violence and burning greed.

He cannot stand to trap her inside of him. Everyday he grasps at those simple frayed threads of himself and wonders who he has the right to be. Piece by piece, he lets go of all that does not belong to him, still fearing that what he finds at the core will no longer be enough to make up a human being.

He reaches the ocean with nothing but an empty bag and an invisible girl at his side. Dropping to his knees, he watches the glistening waves crest and fall onto the sand. It’s been a long time since he’s seen the ocean. The smell of salt throws him back into the body of a young boy holding tight to his mothers hand.

She calls him her brave little lion. He loves when she calls him this, it makes him feel bigger than he is. With newfound courage he walks to the edge of the water, letting the waves chase him up and down the sand. Laughing, his mother scoops him up in her arms and nuzzles his neck gently with her nose.

He wiggles in her arms as she sets him down gently into the water. It feels cold only for a moment.

The man wades in with watering eyes. Past where the waves break he finds himself floating in an endless sky. Something in him cracks for the final time when he removes the locket from his neck, casting it away into the waiting waves. His mothers face sits gently on his eyelids, watching him from her place in the sand. She waits for him to return, smiling patiently and braiding her hair.

When he returns to shore, he is only what the ocean hasn’t washed away. He is his mothers lullaby and the black ash spreading through a desert town. Bones jut out at odd angles under his skin, echoing the landscape of seaside cliffs and rocky mountains. He runs his hand over his body, a great new painting of humankind.