Trash

He gets home late tonight, as he usually does on Saturdays, after working til closing and catching a movie downtown. He slides his key into the downstairs door and begins to make his way up to his third-floor apartment before he remembers to check the mailbox in the entryway. He grabs the few envelopes and leaflets and moves up the stairs. He opens the door to his apartment and switches the lights on and tosses his keys onto the coffee table in the living room and drowsily flips through the mail. Credit card offers, take-out menus, a supermarket circular, and an ad from a lawn-service company which is especially strange since he lives upstairs in an apartment building without a lawn.

None of it is worth keeping so he heads to the kitchen and the trashcan under the sink and deposits the stack of mail.

He kicks his shoes off as he moves down the narrow hallway towards the bedroom. He flicks on the light and changes into his sleeping shorts and a t-shirt. He heads over to the left side of the bed and pulls back the unmade sheets when he pauses, confused as he finds on his pillow a stack of mail. He blinks the encroaching sleep out of his eyes and flips through it. Sure enough, it appears to be the same stack of mail that he believes he just threw away. It’s odd, to be sure, but he’s tired and he doesn’t want to think about this right now. He probably just imagined that he threw it away (he certainly meant to) and carried it in here to the bedroom. He shrugs it off and drops the stack of mail into the small basket by his bed and switches off the light and goes to sleep.

The next night he gets in a little bit after seven. He has a bag of groceries that he picked up on his way home at the market around the corner: some boneless chicken thighs, a bell pepper, an onion. Nothing fancy.  He’s going to make a kind of rudimentary stir-fry that he perfected in college.

He cuts the thighs into chunks and starts to brown them in a bit of sesame oil while he chops the vegetables. For good measure he tosses a heaping spoonful of minced garlic into the pan with the chicken. When he sees the chicken is close to done, he shoves the chopped vegetables into the pan and drenches it in some soy sauce with a little bit of brown sugar and some red pepper flakes. He sticks a lid on that and lets it simmer while he cooks and strains two packs of instant ramen. It’s much more than he can eat in one sitting but he does this all the time and some leftovers never hurt anybody. With the noodles strained he dumps them back in their pot and pours the chicken and vegetables on top and tosses them all together. Bon appetite!

Before he digs in he cleans up the counter, throwing out the ramen packs, the papery onion peel, the pepper stem and ribs, and the juicy styrofoam chicken tray.

He scoops himself a bowlful of noodles from the pot and moves to the living room couch so he can absent-mindedly watch TV while he eats and then for the rest of the evening, his usual Sunday routine. Around 10:30, after a rerun of Gilligan’s Island ends, he turns off the TV and puts the leftovers in the refrigerator (which he had meant to do during a commercial but had been too lazy) and heads down the hall to bed.

He switches on the lights and stands aghast at what he sees. His pillow is littered with trash: two ramen packs, an onion peel, a pepper stem, and a styrofoam chicken tray leaking juices all over his pillowcase.

Flustered and bewildered, he strips the bed and the pillows and takes the sheets and pillowcase and throws them in the washer in the hall. He return to the bedroom and throws open the window and turns on the ceiling fan to start to get the smell of chicken juice out. He gathers the trash together on the chicken tray and carefully carries it to the kitchen where he throws it into the trashcan under the sink. It better stay put this time. He washes and dries his hands and heads back to the bedroom to grab a book so he can read until it’s time to transfer the laundry to the dryer.

There’s trash strewn all over the bedroom now.

He storms back to the kitchen and grabs a fresh trash bag and collects all the garbage and stuffs it in the bag. He rummages under the bathroom sink for some disinfectant spray and some powdered pet odor remover that’s left over from when he used to foster cats. He powders the affected areas of the mattress and sprays the surfaces near the bed. While he waits for the powder to sink in, he decides it’s time to get to the bottom of this.

He drags the trash back to the kitchen and pulls the can from under the sink and goes in for a close examination.

At first he doesn’t see anything, but as his vision refocuses it becomes clear. About a foot below the rim of the trashcan, undulating slightly like the surface of a body of water, is a milky, filmy something, so translucent as to almost be invisible but with a slight glow that gives it away. Kneeling on the floor, he reaches slowly into the can, touching the film and feeling a slight resistance and then suddenly breaking through it. His arm is in it almost up the elbow when suddenly he’s hit hard on the forearm. He jerks his hand back, sure that he’ll have a bruise in the morning. He tries again and once again he’s struck hard, this time on the wrist. He pauses for a beat, hesitates, then raises the trashcan and lowers it onto his head.

Suddenly he’s upside-down and his nose is an inch from the blades of his ceiling fan. He starts, lurches back, kicks the bag on the floor next to him and trips and falls into the table, knocking over a chair. He closes his eyes and shoves the can off his head and he lies on the floor while he tries to recover from the shock.

He goes back into the bedroom, carrying the can, and sets it on the floor. He turns off the fan and steps onto the bed and then stops the blades spinning by catching one of them. His hand fingers come away coated in a dark gray grime. He needs to dust. He rotates the fan out of the way and starts to closely examine the ceiling, looking for another of those filmy portals. He doesn’t see one…

He grabs a ball from the top of his dresser. He peeks through the garbage portal again so he can try to line up his shot. It’s very off-putting seeing his body shuffling around underneath him. When he thinks he knows where to aim he sheds the trashcan and hurls the ball underhand up at the ceiling as hard as he can.

THUD!! It dents the ceiling and comes bouncing back right at his face. He shields himself with his arms and ducks and the ball hits him in the back. That’ll leave another bruise.

           Okay, how does this thing work? He places the trashcan on the bed and drops the ball in and watches it pop out from the portal in the ceiling. It falls and lands on the bed about a foot from the can. He adjusts the can’s position and drops the ball in again. It drips out of the ceiling like a leaky faucet again and again as it drops repeatedly into the can. Now every time it emerges from the ceiling he can see that the portal opens and closes again behind it. It looks as though he dented the ceiling for nothing. Oh well.

           What practical purpose could a portal like this have? He ponders it for a while and draws a blank. He could use it to move small things quickly from the kitchen to the bedroom, but carrying them would likely be just as fast. Hardly worthwhile. It could be a neat party trick, if he was the kind of person to host parties.

He wonders how it got here. Magic? The work of some poltergeist? Some kind of alien experiment? Maybe the whole world as he knows it is in danger from some impending invasion. He doubts it though. Anything small enough to use this portal couldn’t possible pose a real threat.

           Wherever it came from, one thing is clear: He’ll need to invest in a new trashcan for the kitchen.

           He takes the can back to the kitchen and picks up the bag of trash from where he left it on the floor. He catches himself before he drops the bag into the can out of habit. He takes his keys from the coffee table and leaves the apartment, stopping at the garbage chute near the stairs to deposit the trash bag. Since he can’t shove the can in there he makes a short trek down to the curb in his socks. There’s a city trashcan on the corner and he leaves his magic can and hopes he won’t be fined for illegal dumping. This bizarre episode is over.

           Later that night after his sheets are safely in the dryer, his bed is remade with fresh bedclothes, and he’s comfortably asleep, he’s jolted awake by something dropping on his chest. He’s winded, barely half awake, but he opens his eyes a sliver and he feels a scratchy, sandpapery something grating on his temple. He turns over, switches on the light on the bedside table finds just what he expected: A cat. But he’s too tired to worry about this now. He takes an old empty cardboard box from the closet, fills it with some old leftover cat litter from under the bathroom sink, grabs his pillow and blanket and heads to the living room to sleep on the couch. He’ll figure this out in the morning.