Dustbin of Death – Flash Fiction

From that first moment you hear the news that someone you love is gone, you enter a bizarre world of the encumbered, barely wheeling along as others seem to find the strength to pick themselves up and walk.

You become the one remaining receptacle who carries the remnants of the one who unintentionally buggered off, now happily chatting with David Bowie or Alan Parker in someplace in the beyond, inadvertently leaving you feeling stuffed, like some overused refuse bin; overflowing with too much of them and not enough of you.

Fortunately, you were emptied last week to make room for the mass of feelings and emotions which rise like the zombie trapped in the basement from the Evil Dead. Their hands wrap around your throat, squeezing as you try to keep a lid on them by cutting off their fingers.

You become a large wheelie bin, more likely to be blown away by a stiff breeze than stand strong through the storms of life, your insides scattered across the pavement to be dodged by dog walkers or poked at by tiny children whose parents berate them. That is you; and not the green recycling bin either. The rubbish in greens are cleaned, their contents carefully sanitized before being placed inside. Green bins are put aside for others who can cope, those who stand further along the line, those who send absent condolences and who have kept their lives together.

You become a black bin, filled with animal waste and vacuum cleaner contents, stale food, slops, anything others deign to fill you with.

At the wake, you find yourself sitting on the outer rim of a group of people you’ve met once, thirty years ago, with them expecting you to listen intently as they get more pissed and less coherent. Someone strikes up a slurred rendition of Danny Boy towards the end of the night which grates on your nerves like licking the end of a nine-volt battery. You dig your nails into your fist and make a sour face.

Then come the arrangements, the preparations made through a sea of other people’s refuse which they shove down your throat, choking you. Did you know their favourite song was something so fucking obscure, it can’t be sourced in the bowels of the Internet? Or they might remember some other sick, twisted fucker with fondness and toast them over pints of bitter or ten-year-old crème de menthe served from dusty bottles by the landlord of the local pub.

They open their dusty maws and spew forth ancient stories of your beloved, wanting to hug you, smelling of week-old bananas and old lady scents that make Opium from the fucking eighties smell like Chanel Number five. Their wrinkled, craggy chops coated in face-powder and vermillion rouge looks like it has been applied by a mortuary make-up artist. Their breath stinks like foul water you find in the recesses of an outdoor pub ashtray after a September shower. You wonder why your loved one cared so much for them, or they for them.

You lift your lid and smile through gritted teeth, nodding along, taking time to push the refuse down with a proverbial foot, climbing inside to ensure there is enough room for more. You are a plastic receptacle waiting to be filled with more and more until you know you will eventually find yourself left on the curb with a little pink sticker from the council telling you they couldn’t take you because your lid wasn’t closed.

Continually you nudge the feelings deeper, just to get through the day. Just one more day until you can shatter to pieces until you’re permitted by some form of social convention to become you once more and not them. Because once that day comes, those who barely knew the deceased will lower their head and pay their respects. Then they’ll forget it was bin day, as what was left of their friend becomes landfill, a forgotten shrine to what they once were under marble block, to be visited occasionally when the mood takes them.

Not you though, you will rush to the bathroom and vomit up the rubbish, heaving until it’s all gone, creating a vacuum ready to be refilled. It feels like your life will become a never-ending cycle of grief requiring regular evacuation, that emptying once per fortnight will never be enough.

Someone who cares for you will open your lid and peer inside to find what is left of you curled into a ball at the bottom, they will fish you out and cradle you in their arms.

Over the years, your anguish will diminish to the size of a wastepaper bin, but it will always remain; the trauma of your loss. You will find a way to place a sticker on your bin eventually, fighting for yourself and your true contents by telling people what they can and cannot discard.

No longer burdened, you take to throwing away sad, sympathetic smiles to those you pass whose bins are full.