Beyond the garbage dump, the sky was a perfect melange of orange and purple. She had seen skies like this a thousand times over the years, but this twilight was more apropos than all the rest. If it’d been appropriate, she might have smiled, but not tonight, even the least worthy deserve that much respect.
A hundred gulls, each more wretched than the one before, squawked as they battled over shards of the half-poor men’s meals. They screeched to demand their space in this cemetery of stuff that isn’t stuff anymore. They almost seemed to call her name, to call her down, “Come here, come here, so we may hate you too.”
But she did not go down. She stood and watched them cry. She watched them scream. She watched them dance by the dozen around two avocado refrigerators full of darkness and probably mold. She watched them believe the world was this small no-place on the stinky-ass-side of town.
She was taken by the silhouette of a broken arm chair at the top of the largest putrescent pile against the rancid intersection between beautiful colors. It was not lost. There is no loss here. There is the delightful hope that forgetfulness will come quickly. There is the disgusting stench of rotting things best left to the earth. There are the billion billion stars, most too faint to perceive, that hang above and mock this joyful place where the corporeal bits of a small universe have been readied for burial. But there is no loss.
As the silence wafted up from the piles of people’s lives disposed and destroyed, the gulls became more quiet. Then, as the silence grew, she noticed one star. It seemed, it was laughing on the arm of the arm chair, but only for a few moments, as it rose with the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy from the slender line of horizon dividing today from tomorrow.
Perhaps, she thought, the moon was too ashamed, as yet, to join the fracas. It almost seemed, she, being half-full, was waiting for the vermin to pick the bones of all the refuse. Coon by coon, skunk by skunk, coyote by coyote, they slinked in as the hues cooled past the purples and the mauves to the navy blues and blacks.
She did not make a sound. She stood and watched this moment, this freedom, this odious air clinging to the bottom of the sky, and she knew, this had been her.
Like the twilight, she was who she had been. It seemed to her that the rise and fall of each mound was as a wave, rolling off to nowhere. The fading of light, and her thoughts suggested to her that perhaps it was time to set that person she had been upon this heap, upon that chair, beneath that nasty star, and walk away.
Freedom only comes when the garbage is gone, this much she knew too well.
Now that the house was empty of it, the barrels empty of it, the rubbish bins empty of it, the cellar, the attic, the yard – all empty of it – she was free.
But she would not smile yet, even garbage deserves proper burial first.