Tevun-Krus #102 - TrashPunk

Taking Out the Trash - A Story by @DavidGibbs6

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.