Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 15 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
A throng of workers busied themselves smoking and chatting while other workers streamed out of the locker room like ants from a kicked nest. I staggered, nearly crashing into the back of a lumbering guy. My stomach acid churned. I was salivating profusely, and my tongue detected the taste of bile. I clutched my chest with my palm, overwhelmed as if the temperature shift after that fridge of an office had cut off my digestion.
I was hobbling through the cluster of workers when I discovered Caroline standing by the container. She regarded me with curiosity, then withdrew her empty hand from the heap of trash.
I wavered, dizzy. Caroline. I had quit the workshop, yet that woman would keep coming—and that would be the end.
My sight clouded. I gasped for air. As I approached Caroline, she turned as if to greet me, and I swept her into my arms, lifting her a few inches off the ground. When I pressed my injured cheek against hers, mine flared with a burning pain. Her hair smelled like some stuffed toy that had gathered layers of dust in a storage room.
It took all my effort to unknot my throat.
“It should have been different.”
Her small breasts were mashed against my chest, and the jagged contours of her ribs dug into my forearms. The woman’s hands clawed at my back beneath my shoulder blades, her broken nails sharp as razor tips. Caroline would shred my shirt and undershirt, slit open my skin, pry apart my flesh, wrench my ribs until they splintered like rotted timber, root through my entrails, and drag out my lungs and heart through the gashes. She’d cram the organs into her dress pockets until the seams split, then return home to scale her tower of shattered relics and perch my lungs and heart at the pinnacle. There, they’d bleed out, drenching the machine parts and her bronze horse in a slick glaze of varnish.
I peeled away from her like a band-aid. As I walked off, I fixed my gaze straight ahead. I was nearing the blurry line of vehicles and those waiting inside or out. The workshop, the yard, this daily crowd—they all receded into the past. Goodbye to this dump. Goodbye to the whir and thrum and squeaks of rubber dragging over dozens of rollers. I wished I could expel them from my mind, forget every second I had wasted here.
A gust of hot air swept dust onto the legs of my pants. I knew I was approaching my car, parked in front of the fence of the adjacent lot, because I sliced through a swampy stench that seeped through the gaps in the trunk and enveloped the vehicle’s body. When it invaded my nose, a retch struck me. I pressed my lips together and covered my mouth as I circled the car. After positioning the trunk between the workshop and me, I knelt on the gritty asphalt and retched violently, bile erupting through my nostrils and mouth like a geyser. Each spasm splattered the asphalt with a wet slap, pooling into a carrot-orange slick.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed cars passing by, and behind their windows, ghostly faces. I spat, then slumped against the curb. My throat and nostrils burned. Drenched in cold sweat and steeped in the stench, I pressed my forehead against the scorching metal of the car’s body. My consciousness floated like a rock in a stream of lava.
Come on, Alan. By now you should understand how it works. Life darkens in a gradual slip until the last light goes out.
I rubbed my mouth and wiped my dirty hand on my pants as I circled the car toward the driver’s door. I stepped into the cramped, closed compartment of the vehicle, which may as well have been a lit heater aimed at a rotting corpse. I lowered the window and breathed through my mouth. When I started the engine, it coughed like an old man.
A rear door swung open. I looked over my shoulder as if I suspected someone was pressed against my bedroom window in the dead of night. Christopher folded his giraffe-like frame into the seat.
“You can take me downtown, right?”
“No.”
The man, as if assuming I’d recited the correct line from a script, had gotten in and closed the door. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to settle into a seat with some loose spring that jabbed his buttocks.
I opened my mouth to order him out, but the SUV belonging to the supervisor’s sister was maneuvering to merge onto the road, and the mob of workers was multiplying as if about to engulf my car. I pictured them pounding on the windows and climbing onto the hood. I accelerated.
“You forgot to stop by the locker room,” Christopher said.
The purple sleeves of the work coat covered my arms.
“I’ll keep it as a gift.”
Half a mile from the workshop, I stole a glance at the man in the rearview mirror. He had lowered his window to let the air in.
Out in the desert to my right, oil pumps bobbed along like families of elephants. The muscles in my neck relaxed.
“Do you like this?” Christopher asked.
In the mirror, his brown irises floated in egg-yellow sclera. His eyelids were heavy, and his features a far cry from his usual imitation of a dog eager for its master’s attention.
“I often drive for pleasure,” I said.
“Working at the workshop.”
I shook my head. Why was he asking? Did I care? I paused at an intersection and glanced both ways before speaking again.
“How could I like it? Do you like it?”
“Somebody must.”
“Well, I’d like to meet that person and punch them.”
Christopher fell silent.
On the sidewalk, past evenly spaced decorative trees, beauty and clothing stores lined up. Dozens of people occupied the outdoor tables of cafés and bars, drinking and chatting under marigold-orange parasols. A woman browsed a storefront while clutching her shopping bags. A group of children shrieked and laughed.
At every bump, Christopher trembled. He scratched along the arched seam of his shaved head. My insides turned cold once more.
“Do you know what I worked as before the accident?” the man asked.
“You were a civil engineer.”
Christopher stiffened and his eyes widened as if I had unearthed a secret from his childhood.
“How do you know?”
“You’ve told me a couple of times.”
His face contorted. The man ran his fingers over the raised edges of his scar, and shrank as if wanting the backrest to swallow him.
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s alright, really. Everyone does what they can.”
“Let yourself be carried by the current. Someone told me that. Act like the person you need to be, and eventually you’ll get used to it.”
“Sounds degrading.”
Christopher lowered his voice, talking to himself.
“When you can’t keep pace with people, they leave you behind. It’s hard to get someone to stop even for a moment.”
What had this guy meant by “downtown”? Did he expect me to know where they usually dropped him off, or had he forgotten that he was supposed to get off at some point?
“I mean, at the workshop I can talk to other people,” Christopher said, “and I’m getting paid. But is it worth it?”
I exhaled through clenched teeth. I shrugged.
The man wrinkled his nose, then cupped his palm over the lower half of his face.
“I have to ask. What is that stench? Have you left your lunch out in the sun for a week?”
“I’ve hidden a dead child in the trunk, and it’s rotting.”
I came to my senses as if waking up in a cryogenic chamber, and slowed the car in case it rammed into some obstacle. Had that sentence really come out of my mouth?
The sounds bubbled back as Christopher spat out a laugh. He had closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but his laugh was cut short, his face soured, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The man bowed his head. After a shudder, tears brimmed over, trailing along the wrinkles that bracketed his mouth.
I drove rigidly, holding my breath, in case any misstep tempted Christopher to get out of the car and extract the child. In the rearview mirror, the man had pressed his chin to his chest and was wiping away his tears.
A car pulled up so close that its bumper nearly slammed into my trunk. It honked like someone would ring a doorbell when being chased. Héctor. The oily bastard, taking advantage of a stretch where no vehicle came from the opposite lane, swerved and accelerated until the front of his car aligned with mine. He leaned toward the lowered passenger window to shout at Christopher.
“What are you doing, man? I’ve waited to pick you up after work, only to find out you’ve gotten into the car of this psychopath?”
When Christopher lifted his head, he furrowed his brow as if to burst a pimple. Two wrinkles on his forehead formed a V. In his eyes burned the anger of someone ready to break his knuckles against a wall.
“Shut up.”
Héctor recoiled, pale, and regarded his companion as if he were an impostor.
A truck from the opposite lane roared, and Héctor braked and maneuvered to return to my lane. At the next intersection, I turned to avoid him. Two blocks later, that man’s car had vanished from the rearview mirror.
For a few minutes I drove on autopilot. In the darkness of my mind, the child’s skin blistered into dozens of boils that burst, expelling a poisonous gas.
Through his window, Christopher pointed to a building. We were approaching the shopping mall, its facade rising like stretches of beige battlements adorned with the signs of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a J.C. Penney, and a Ralph Lauren. Along the facade, rectangular openings gaped, darkened by the angle of the sun.
“Right here.”
I parked. Christopher emerged as if from a dog kennel, and when he stretched, half of his torso disappeared over the car’s body.
“Thanks.”
I hunched to look at him through the window, but the man was turning toward the mall. I caught a glimpse of his neck.
“Take care.”
He walked away with unsteady steps among couples and parents with their children. Christopher’s figure—towering at least two heads above most, gangly like a tree grown crooked—vanished beneath the mall’s lights.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “The Rip” by Portishead.
Back then it wasn’t yet time to return to you, Caroline.
A throng of workers busied themselves smoking and chatting while other workers streamed out of the locker room like ants from a kicked nest. I staggered, nearly crashing into the back of a lumbering guy. My stomach acid churned. I was salivating profusely, and my tongue detected the taste of bile. I clutched my chest with my palm, overwhelmed as if the temperature shift after that fridge of an office had cut off my digestion.
I was hobbling through the cluster of workers when I discovered Caroline standing by the container. She regarded me with curiosity, then withdrew her empty hand from the heap of trash.
I wavered, dizzy. Caroline. I had quit the workshop, yet that woman would keep coming—and that would be the end.
My sight clouded. I gasped for air. As I approached Caroline, she turned as if to greet me, and I swept her into my arms, lifting her a few inches off the ground. When I pressed my injured cheek against hers, mine flared with a burning pain. Her hair smelled like some stuffed toy that had gathered layers of dust in a storage room.
It took all my effort to unknot my throat.
“It should have been different.”
Her small breasts were mashed against my chest, and the jagged contours of her ribs dug into my forearms. The woman’s hands clawed at my back beneath my shoulder blades, her broken nails sharp as razor tips. Caroline would shred my shirt and undershirt, slit open my skin, pry apart my flesh, wrench my ribs until they splintered like rotted timber, root through my entrails, and drag out my lungs and heart through the gashes. She’d cram the organs into her dress pockets until the seams split, then return home to scale her tower of shattered relics and perch my lungs and heart at the pinnacle. There, they’d bleed out, drenching the machine parts and her bronze horse in a slick glaze of varnish.
I peeled away from her like a band-aid. As I walked off, I fixed my gaze straight ahead. I was nearing the blurry line of vehicles and those waiting inside or out. The workshop, the yard, this daily crowd—they all receded into the past. Goodbye to this dump. Goodbye to the whir and thrum and squeaks of rubber dragging over dozens of rollers. I wished I could expel them from my mind, forget every second I had wasted here.
A gust of hot air swept dust onto the legs of my pants. I knew I was approaching my car, parked in front of the fence of the adjacent lot, because I sliced through a swampy stench that seeped through the gaps in the trunk and enveloped the vehicle’s body. When it invaded my nose, a retch struck me. I pressed my lips together and covered my mouth as I circled the car. After positioning the trunk between the workshop and me, I knelt on the gritty asphalt and retched violently, bile erupting through my nostrils and mouth like a geyser. Each spasm splattered the asphalt with a wet slap, pooling into a carrot-orange slick.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed cars passing by, and behind their windows, ghostly faces. I spat, then slumped against the curb. My throat and nostrils burned. Drenched in cold sweat and steeped in the stench, I pressed my forehead against the scorching metal of the car’s body. My consciousness floated like a rock in a stream of lava.
Come on, Alan. By now you should understand how it works. Life darkens in a gradual slip until the last light goes out.
I rubbed my mouth and wiped my dirty hand on my pants as I circled the car toward the driver’s door. I stepped into the cramped, closed compartment of the vehicle, which may as well have been a lit heater aimed at a rotting corpse. I lowered the window and breathed through my mouth. When I started the engine, it coughed like an old man.
A rear door swung open. I looked over my shoulder as if I suspected someone was pressed against my bedroom window in the dead of night. Christopher folded his giraffe-like frame into the seat.
“You can take me downtown, right?”
“No.”
The man, as if assuming I’d recited the correct line from a script, had gotten in and closed the door. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to settle into a seat with some loose spring that jabbed his buttocks.
I opened my mouth to order him out, but the SUV belonging to the supervisor’s sister was maneuvering to merge onto the road, and the mob of workers was multiplying as if about to engulf my car. I pictured them pounding on the windows and climbing onto the hood. I accelerated.
“You forgot to stop by the locker room,” Christopher said.
The purple sleeves of the work coat covered my arms.
“I’ll keep it as a gift.”
Half a mile from the workshop, I stole a glance at the man in the rearview mirror. He had lowered his window to let the air in.
Out in the desert to my right, oil pumps bobbed along like families of elephants. The muscles in my neck relaxed.
“Do you like this?” Christopher asked.
In the mirror, his brown irises floated in egg-yellow sclera. His eyelids were heavy, and his features a far cry from his usual imitation of a dog eager for its master’s attention.
“I often drive for pleasure,” I said.
“Working at the workshop.”
I shook my head. Why was he asking? Did I care? I paused at an intersection and glanced both ways before speaking again.
“How could I like it? Do you like it?”
“Somebody must.”
“Well, I’d like to meet that person and punch them.”
Christopher fell silent.
On the sidewalk, past evenly spaced decorative trees, beauty and clothing stores lined up. Dozens of people occupied the outdoor tables of cafés and bars, drinking and chatting under marigold-orange parasols. A woman browsed a storefront while clutching her shopping bags. A group of children shrieked and laughed.
At every bump, Christopher trembled. He scratched along the arched seam of his shaved head. My insides turned cold once more.
“Do you know what I worked as before the accident?” the man asked.
“You were a civil engineer.”
Christopher stiffened and his eyes widened as if I had unearthed a secret from his childhood.
“How do you know?”
“You’ve told me a couple of times.”
His face contorted. The man ran his fingers over the raised edges of his scar, and shrank as if wanting the backrest to swallow him.
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s alright, really. Everyone does what they can.”
“Let yourself be carried by the current. Someone told me that. Act like the person you need to be, and eventually you’ll get used to it.”
“Sounds degrading.”
Christopher lowered his voice, talking to himself.
“When you can’t keep pace with people, they leave you behind. It’s hard to get someone to stop even for a moment.”
What had this guy meant by “downtown”? Did he expect me to know where they usually dropped him off, or had he forgotten that he was supposed to get off at some point?
“I mean, at the workshop I can talk to other people,” Christopher said, “and I’m getting paid. But is it worth it?”
I exhaled through clenched teeth. I shrugged.
The man wrinkled his nose, then cupped his palm over the lower half of his face.
“I have to ask. What is that stench? Have you left your lunch out in the sun for a week?”
“I’ve hidden a dead child in the trunk, and it’s rotting.”
I came to my senses as if waking up in a cryogenic chamber, and slowed the car in case it rammed into some obstacle. Had that sentence really come out of my mouth?
The sounds bubbled back as Christopher spat out a laugh. He had closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but his laugh was cut short, his face soured, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The man bowed his head. After a shudder, tears brimmed over, trailing along the wrinkles that bracketed his mouth.
I drove rigidly, holding my breath, in case any misstep tempted Christopher to get out of the car and extract the child. In the rearview mirror, the man had pressed his chin to his chest and was wiping away his tears.
A car pulled up so close that its bumper nearly slammed into my trunk. It honked like someone would ring a doorbell when being chased. Héctor. The oily bastard, taking advantage of a stretch where no vehicle came from the opposite lane, swerved and accelerated until the front of his car aligned with mine. He leaned toward the lowered passenger window to shout at Christopher.
“What are you doing, man? I’ve waited to pick you up after work, only to find out you’ve gotten into the car of this psychopath?”
When Christopher lifted his head, he furrowed his brow as if to burst a pimple. Two wrinkles on his forehead formed a V. In his eyes burned the anger of someone ready to break his knuckles against a wall.
“Shut up.”
Héctor recoiled, pale, and regarded his companion as if he were an impostor.
A truck from the opposite lane roared, and Héctor braked and maneuvered to return to my lane. At the next intersection, I turned to avoid him. Two blocks later, that man’s car had vanished from the rearview mirror.
For a few minutes I drove on autopilot. In the darkness of my mind, the child’s skin blistered into dozens of boils that burst, expelling a poisonous gas.
Through his window, Christopher pointed to a building. We were approaching the shopping mall, its facade rising like stretches of beige battlements adorned with the signs of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a J.C. Penney, and a Ralph Lauren. Along the facade, rectangular openings gaped, darkened by the angle of the sun.
“Right here.”
I parked. Christopher emerged as if from a dog kennel, and when he stretched, half of his torso disappeared over the car’s body.
“Thanks.”
I hunched to look at him through the window, but the man was turning toward the mall. I caught a glimpse of his neck.
“Take care.”
He walked away with unsteady steps among couples and parents with their children. Christopher’s figure—towering at least two heads above most, gangly like a tree grown crooked—vanished beneath the mall’s lights.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “The Rip” by Portishead.
Back then it wasn’t yet time to return to you, Caroline.
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