Trashcan, Unmoved

Trashcan, Unmoved

At dawn, I wake alone with a start —crutch quietly with precision like my first drive alone in the Escort: the carpet foreboding as rush hour traffic, the furniture fierce as intersections, the tile sneaky as ice. Stepping so gingerly my brace, sleep sweaty, does not move, my aluminum crutches lift up and up. We labor toward the kitchen. It takes twenty minutes, these twenty odd paces.

All the bags shoved into the ugly can reek of decomposed chicken carcass, sanitary napkins, and other rank food stuffs that cannot wait until the next collection.

The can’s belly is less than the width of the door, but how to move it? I can’t heave it up anymore and march to the curb. It thuds when tapped at its base by a crutch’s toe. It won’t budge and pain shoots down my back, down my leg.

I live alone in an alley in a shitty apartment. Two hours until pick up— two hours to get this can to the curb.

Kicking with foot, shoving with knee, sliding with chair and crutch, I curse and cry and pop Vicodin and eat a granola bar. Frustration floods my pores, the sweet sweat I remember from childhood when Mom flipped flash cards for mathematics, sitting parallel to me on the hard dining room chairs. The trashcan finally looms on the threshold’s lip,

ready to stumble down the stairs. I duct-tape the lid, so it won’t spill in flight.

Crutch cocked like shotgun, it leaps toward the can, launches it with furious chutzpah, down the steps, and there the plastic can lay, unbroken, at the bottom. Muscle spasms seize my back.

Spent and beaten, I’m a young woman who witnesses what random accident can do to flesh and bone, who is patched together with medications, elastic, Velcro, metal, wires, hope, who’s incapable of domestic chores so simple as taking out the trash.

Later that morning, this young woman crutches forty minutes from her handicap spot in the closest parking lot to work, thinking of the trash can, lying lifeless on its smooth unscuffed belly on the cracked sidewalk, like the dead kitten she’d found after school by the curb in front of her home. She feels her sweaty, chafed armpits moan, wipes them with paper towel after taking thirty minutes to pee. Then, she smiles at co-workers, says, “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”