![]() He’d guide me to the edge of the pit, and coach me how to throw the bag so that it went some distance. We’d pull up in the Oldsmobile, park, pop the trunk. When I was lucky, my father would take me to the city dump-a partially roofed drive-thru facility on the Halifax Waterfront. Charge? Bite? They do nothing but nose their way through the garbage under the smoldering Caribbean sun. I veer as far from the dump as I can, while staying on the path to the potter’s house, unsure of what the pigs will do. Their ears flap and their snouts curl up like the shoes of elves. I’ve never seen pigs this big outside a petting zoo, outside a fence. I stumble upon a dump, where pigs the size of trucks feast. I follow directions from the terminal, up a hill, to the left, a sweeping curve. Not the shards and broken bits I’m drawn to on the beach, but whole pieces, smoothed, glazed, tagged. I get off the ferry in Bequia in the West Indies, in search of pottery. Sometimes they keep only one foot on the footplate, so that the other hangs dangerously in the air, teasing the pavement racing beneath their suspended steel-toed boots. They wave to their fans, the children, the dreamers. Their chins are lifted, their chests proud. The garbage men ride on the back like soldiers liberating an allied city, World Series champs in a homecoming parade, trash heroes. It is the eighties, and the truck is a rear loader. My classmates want to be hockey players or horseback riders, dentists, lawyers, traders. ![]() I am seven and hear the garbage truck winding down the hill. The dark joy girls feel when another gets her comeuppance. Tonight, I learn the fragility of female friendship, the limits. Only one follows me to the bathroom and tells me I’m not trash. I’m in a group of girls: friends, teammates. The way he enunciates the ‘sh’ in trash, the way he tells me to shhhh. The muscles in his neck, the frenetic movement of his pupils, the waving finger tell me so. In a Virginia Beach nightclub, a man calls me trash. At five o’clock, a father in a three-piece suit wrangles a pair of bins back up the street. The bins roll back and forth in the middle of the road waiting to be rehomed. The woman in thirty-six has been binge eating again thirty-four’s on the sauce (six empty bottles of Smirnoff and a shattered quart of whiskey) twenty-seven’s in five-digit debt. The bins exchange lids, mix smells, share secrets. Our empty garbage cans, round and flimsy, roll down the street and cavort with the neighbors’. He was twenty-five years old.Ī Maritime storm. Skateboarders find him charred, floating in the garbage on Sunday morning. ![]() They never saw the body of the man who’d been reported missing the night before, the boy I went to school with. But they never saw that it was a man on fire, not trash. They reel the hoses in, head back to the station, file a report. They put out the flames, creating a foamy mess. ![]() ![]() The fire department responds to a dumpster blaze on a Saturday afternoon. A hint of whiskers, the shadow of a tail, wriggling. Like a damsel in distress, a Hollywood horror. Tiny gnarled claws splayed against plastic, grainy and stretched. An appeal: may I?Ī memory of a mouse inside a white bag of trash. I stare at the black hole of the hopper, the hockey bag clutched in my hand, and then make eye contact with the driver. He releases the lift, the fork snatches my bin, hauls it up and away. Braless, I pick up the bag, and sprint barefoot down the driveway. All that’s left is the plastic frame and the wheels. A strap, a zipper, a flap of soiled canvas. The old hockey bag spread inside the front entry for the past month didn’t fit, despite the fact I’d been dismembering it for weeks, disposing of it in serial-killer pieces. I’ve already taken the black bin to the curb. Just before seven a.m., I hear the garbage truck. ![]()
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