garbage – Livesay Writing

Hi.

Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s

There was a man standing beside a cascade of trashbags piled on his porch. This was the first floor, a nearby apartment. I saw him in the dark. It was 7pm. Rain was coming down, lightly, and it was cold, breezy. The man had fingerless gloves and an iphone. He was wearing a jacket and a hood. I walked past him and was so distracted I went to the wrong car. Walking back, I heard him talking. Words get amplified in a rainstorm. It’s like you’re listening through the other end of a paper-cup phone.

“Mm,” he said, and “Uh-huh.”

I got in my car and turned the heat up. Pulling back, I saw him caught in the back-up camera. The porchlight was on, attracting ghosts of summer bugs. His face and hands were wet but he wasn’t wiping them. bits of rain made rivers on the trashbag mountain. And I was thinking, “What could there be in all those trashbags?” No-one keeps so much garbage. Or, rather, we all do, but we don’t often have the guts to throw it out.

When I came home from supper, the man – and the mountain – were gone.

Currently Reading: Another Country, James Baldwin

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Little by little I came to the conclusion that in this day and age only the garbagemen could bring a poetic thought to fruition.
Wolfgang Hillbig, The Tidings of the Trees

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My roommate was skinning chicken on the kitchen counter. She had a long sharp knife, a pair of rubber gloves, and a trashbag for the bones. Little pink lumps like a bunch of beetles turned inside-out. They crawled around the counter and registered for a one-night residency teaching anatomy classes in my head.

I’d been thinking about cooking something tonight, but instead I went with cereal.

My thumb’s mostly healed from where I’d cut it chopping onions two weeks ago. The skin’s a little lower like a crater and it’s very red and smooth. I imagine I’ll have a scar for a while. Call me twisted, but there’s something seductive to me about having small scars. Knicks and marks that only you and people closest to you will ever notice – notching on the wall of a body prison.

I talked to a man today who’s moving to Wilmington. It’s got good business for him and he wanted to be closer to the ocean. Eventually, that plastic bag full of chicken bones might find itself in the same Atlantic waters. It’ll travel on the back of a garbage truck, settle in a landfill, let in enough light and moisture for the bones to decompose (but only partially), then, during a bad thunderstorm or errant hurricane, it will wash off the heaps of trash and run from creek to creek to the nearest river, tumbling in the waves, occasionally getting caught on overturned trees or submerged boulders, but finally – inevitably – it’ll get swept out to sea. One morning, years from now, the man who moved to Wilmington might find it, but will he recognize it for what it was? Or will all that time in the ocean have stripped it so clean that it’s barely a trashbag, much less a bag of chicken bones?

There’s no telling what comes back to you. And often, we don’t even recognize it when it does.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Tag: garbage

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