I have some issues with where I live, as do most people, but no matter how loud the neighbors are late into the night, how small my property seems, how much money I make, how many times I’ve wanted to move away and start over, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I could never leave this place.
The mission-style terracotta shingles on the roofs, the little parking lots for all the different home groupings, the freshly mowed patches of grass along the sidewalks. It’s a beautiful little apartment complex, tucked away from the city so all the families and children can walk and play in peace.
But they don’t. They like to close themselves off from each other and conceal the sound of their voice like buried treasure. Even the hallways are rarely walked here, a dead echo saturates their emptiness with every step like the carcass of a long-abandoned home.
Sometimes, though, sometimes they’ll lock eyes. Sometimes they’ll even talk to each other. But they never joke, discuss the weather, share their names, their lives, their interests. For an umbilical cord of disgust and loathing grows from each of their bellies and tangles them all together, and that is all which binds them to one another, all which binds them to these walls.
And stuffed in the corner of the smooth asphalt parking lot, there’s a little shed. A little chain link fence shed, with faux wood woven tightly through the holes in striated lines. And in that little shed there’s a dumpster, a massive metal sarcophagus: a place of rest for all the unwanted things.
They hate it. They hate how it smells, how it looks, how it holds everything they don’t want—but still, they’ll go. One at a time, to cleanse themselves and their homes. They’ll open up that shed and throw in their bulging bags and overspilling boxes, and they’ll spit at it with a furrowed frown before slamming the black lid down again. But still, they’ll go.
But there’s more than just the acrid rubble and pieces and remains of materials in that big metal box; for, at its basin, there lies a little man. A little emaciated man of considerable height, folded up and crammed out of sight like a rejected Christmas present. His long and gangly limbs curl inward like the legs of a dead spider so that the joints meet his chest, and skeletal ridges bulge beneath his skin of a cadaverous white.
When the mountainous hoard of stained plastics, tainted materials, and unwanted toys and food isn’t frantically built up to cover his body, you can see how his chest swells and recedes in a labored tempo. And his eyes forever open, you can get a glimpse of how the milky cornea blends the iris into the fleshy white like those of a drowned corpse. His arms clutch a tattered stuffed bear to his chest, a dearly held memento from a distant time, a time when perhaps he had a name and when his eyes perhaps glimmered with a vibrant green.
But now he rots beneath the smothering weight of waste where a lost sense of hope atrophies alongside spoiled meat and decomposing fruit, ensnared in the strings which once made him dance.
Now he’s alone. A little man who lay discarded, nailed to a cross of his own inadequacy and his scoffed and doubted ambitions. “The only Christ he could ever deserve” they’ll say with a tinge of contempt as he festers until the worms and putrid life consume his body and thoughts only to excrete them later on as more waste.
But I feel pity for him. I’ll pull the blinds open with my finger to see that little shed late at night, the ambient tungsten light from the streetlamps will waft over its open roof and spill across the plastic lid of his sepulcher. It never opens, but I pray that one day it does so he can find his way out.
I can hardly stomach the sight of my neighbors as they violently strike their trash upon him and spit at whatever part of his body lies exposed. I think about that bear he holds so close to his drawn and dwindling heart, how its tattered fur once bore the cleanliness of a new toy when it was given to him so long ago.
But I still need to take out the trash. It weighs on me, though I can’t let them know, I can’t diverge from the rule they’ve created and upheld.
So when the time comes and I shamble into the hallway, lugging behind a sack of garbage like an offering, I smother my pity like a fragile puppy wrapped and strangled in a blanket. It’s a little thing but, no matter how hard I squeeze, I can always feel it twitching.
Sometimes I’ll see a neighbor walk by and sometimes they’ll say something callous about the little man at the bottom of the bin. Somewhere inside, tucked nearly out of my reach, I can feel that puppy gain a bit of strength as he yelps and kicks his little leg in defiance. But I just squeeze my hands tighter until he goes quiet again, and I smile before shooting back another shameful remark.
And when I step to the dumpster with my bags, like an ax soon to befall the chopping block, I herd my thoughts and composure with the same precision of the eyes at my back. The guilt bubbles and churns within, but I always manage to make it fizzle out for a moment as I fling open the plastic lid and bludgeon him like an insect.
I always worried that if I wore my remorse on a sleeve then I too would be rejected and left to rot. So for years I suppressed my thoughts to chase that allure of belonging, I placated those watchful eyes and the expectations behind them, joining their dance at the pull of a string.
One day, the lid of his dumpster was pushed partially open by a crowd of random angles bulging against bitumen bags, intersecting and dispersing wildly as though trying to crawl away from their fate. But alas came the bulky machine to empty it once more and forever rid the people of their garbage. But never of the little man.
The droning hum of flies soon dispersed and he was left truly alone as he always had been. Except, of course, for the company of his little brown bear. This was a weekly ritual which I had paid no mind, no significance, on that day; until I heard the yelling and laughing and playing of children—a sound seldom heard in such a place.
A grin widened across my face as the sound of joy—true joy—wafted through my window. Could this place finally become the haven it was set out to be? I reminisced of my own youth, all the time I spent playing outside, and rejoiced in the possibility that the kids here could finally start having a normal childhood away from all the bitterness.
A thunderous crash rang out and pulled me from my thoughts. A piercing slam into a hollowed metallic surface, reverberating like a quivering cry for help. My smile dropped and I rushed to the window, fear held my breath. Had they gotten carried away and hurt themselves?
Through the glass I could see all three boys outside, unscathed. They were smiling as their joyous shouting and laughing would’ve suggested, but I felt no relief. My fear merely mutated into anger. The dumpster lid had been hurled open by the children, who couldn’t have been taller than the dumpster itself.
One boy faced my window with scraggly blonde hair flowing across his forehead and a wide smile that bore a lost tooth and pushed his chubby cheeks away at each corner. He sat on the rim of the opening, one leg inside, as he lifted the little man’s tattered bear to the sky like a severed head being presented to the gods.
That was all I could take. I knew the neighbors were watching as always, mocking the man and celebrating the little blonde boy as his friends were. I knew they would see me as I rushed down the hallway and hurdled through the door. But outside not even shadows could hide from the sun, and I saw everything in its golden light: how they gathered at their windows to watch the quartering of that tattered bear, foaming at the mouths while the three boys pulled at a different limb.
I started running at the kids as they pulled back and forth at the thing, shouting “Stop! Put that down!”
Their heads snapped toward me, their smooth little faces petrified by fear. All three of them had stopped pulling but it was too late, for the bear was a tattered and fragile thing and could withstand their torment no longer, and so it gave up with a loud tear.
The boys stumbled back as it pulled apart and they ran away, screaming, dropping each piece of the dismembered bear against the asphalt. I knelt above the doleful scraps and scooped one of the arms into my hands. I could feel the ratty fur as I cradled it, and noticed that the stuffing was the only remnant of its past purity—untouched by the suffering of the flesh. Its little button eyes looked strangely at peace now, juxtaposed by the torture they had to endure. And I knew what I had to do.
I stepped up and brushed my knees clean before making my way to the open dumpster. Sunlight pooled in, soaking the little man’s pale skin and I noticed how his eyes were closed now, a look of sorrow stained across his face.
I wrapped my fingers on the flaky metal rim and lifted myself up before kicking a leg over. The crash of my feet against the metal was deafening on the inside, and I cupped my hands over my ears as the vibrations against my soles rang out through the floor and walls.
His chest would rise and fall as it did before, but hardly enough to notice by now. The flames had been smothered long ago and he had been left with only their remains, slowly flickering out. But a lone ember fizzled and crackled within. I hunched over his spindling frame and rested my hands around that scrawny throat.
His eyes opened to me as I squeezed, but they were no longer vacuous. His breath wheezed its way out as I clenched his airway shut, my hands shaking, teeth gritting, as I squeezed and wrung at his neck. I could see a hint of green return somewhere in the pale haze beneath that milky iris.
I felt nothing as he laid there and succumbed to me. At the end he choked out a single breathy phrase, the only words ever spoke, the only utterance ever heard from his tongue, before his body fell limp and could finally decompose.
“Thank you.”