Trashman

Another day

   With a whirring sound from the giant tube in the sky, that extends far beyond sight, falls another batch of trash. As usual, man in a down jacket and a dirty boots with pants comes to check on it with his trusty carrier. His job is to clean the mess that comes from the numerous rusty metal pipes from the sky. 

   This task is unachievable. One man can't handle the amount of the pipes and garbage flow here. The world around simply is the trash.

   Sky gets darker the deeper it goes in this place. The man took a habit of staring at it until the flow of junk stops. It did shortly after. Not an enormous pile. Often times these mountains include corpses in them. 

   The man started slowly digging through garbage with his hands that had gloves so old, they looked fused with his hands, looking for something. His hand touched something soft. It was another corpse. A thin and pale one. A body of a child. But... It's not dead?

   There was a heard feeble breathing coming from the kid, as if struggling to breathe. It was a girl, covered in bruises, bleeding from the mouth and missing a tooth in the front row. Her neatly stitched yellow dress with a small white decorative apron was all torn in places of her bruises. This didn't look survivable for someone this small.

   The man put her softly on the carrier and continued digging through trash with his crinkly scrawny hands. He wasn't weak, however. It didn't take long. Nothing of value today. But he did find another corpse, this time dead for sure.

   Road from this pipe to the man's house was quick, that's why he mostly comes to this one each trash day, it's the closest. The second one was around five kilometers from his home in the opposite direction. And a human eye could never see the third one.

   It's home. House rather, trash is the home. An old shack made of scrap. It's not that bad looking, just really old. It was full of space inside, having a gas stove, table, chair and many more weird antics. 

   First things first, the man decided to cater to the girl's wounds. She looks no older than twelve. He took out the water bottle and set a sieve to filter it. While it was filtering, he found a paper sheet on the ground, brushed it off and applied to the girl's wounds, covering one after another. 

   He threw out the soaked paper and reached for the water, pouring it on her wounds to clean them. This is how he treated his own scars. Now that the girl is patched up, he can start his own routine.

   First, he sits at the table before the rudely carved alphabet board. The man's low and toneless voice pronounces each letter. 

   Second, he goes out the shack and grabs the food remains in front of it. These may come with the trash and he cleans them with water before eating. They are kept in a makeshift freezer just outside the shack. 

   Then he eats the food. It's a slice of black meat from an undistinguishable animal and a leaf. Maybe that's a paper or a carton, not a plant, but the man didn't eat anything else, so he forgot the taste of anything else.

   Third, the man fiddles with a scrap. He has a separate room from the so-called kitchen of this shack where he keeps a bunch of junk and his bed with a chest. This time he tries to rebuild the clean-looking watch that he found yesterday. He fails once again.

   And lastly; he goes to the back of the shack. Behind is a cemetery. There are countless gravestones, but the deeper man goes, the simpler they become, until there just becomes a garden of sticks and stones. When he prepared to bring a newly found corpse to its grave, he heard a rumble inside his room.

   The girl is awake now. She does not look good, but she can stand on her own now. Behind the curtain that acts as a door to the shack, she watches.

   The man doesn't object. He continues the preparation. Corpse is on the carrier now. It looks human enough to be buried.