‘Don’t get up, it’s Bin Day.’
The rattling call of the garbage truck could always be heard some thirty minutes before it swung round onto Ardent St and parked in front of my doorstep. Acute heading and a troublesome back had lent me to the unfortunate rousing of a light-sleeper, and in the forthcoming line of recycling bins there was to be a clatter and crash that could shake even the devil awake; leading me to forever lament the bower bird nature of alcoholics. It’s quite a noise beyond description, glass upon glass as it falls from the mouth of a bin: expectorant being expunged and a hacking cough that would mark the end for the sickly creature inflicted by it.
This was to be my weekly alarm clock, and, despite my letters requesting a change of route, the council’s dogged adherence to the existing schedule was like a tree stump that I may never uproot–may it rot away and be replaced in the next election.
The regular doldrums of noise would raise me from weak slumber once again, seventeen bins emptied in succession and the guttural revving of each forward lurch of the garbage truck. I lay and waited, but it was a brief pause of irregularity that underscored this morning’s dirge. The truck had paused. For several long moments I lay in bed and listened to the rumble of its nearby engine, a choking splutter of oil rich exhaust. Two pips of a horn and then an impatient blast fully shocked me awake and caused me to leap to the window, frightful rage barely holding me back from screaming.
Beyond my garden wall I could see a vehicle had parked in the centre of the road, blocking any passing, and forcing the lazy truck driver to resort to ‘making a loud noise’, such was his limited problem-solving capability. The beseechment of swearing did warble gruffly between the sounding of the truck’s horn, and, with fury unbridled, I marched toward my front door to similarly give this intrusion a blunt reproach that they would not forget.
Ardent St is a narrow lane, built before the advent of common sense. So, the potential of an about-face from any vehicle longer than a Morris Mini Minor was all but an impossibility. The truck driver, heard to have left his chariot of refuse, was in the process of kicking at the blockade and using brute force in an attempt to move it.
I threw open my door and enjoined the truck driver in my being halted.
It was Tuesday, that was regular, and on any other Tuesday it would irregular for me to find the milkman standing on my landing while frozen in time. The worker appeared as if they had become a ghost filed into the wrong chapter of the chronology of a calendar, half-erased but visible still. The unmoving form was hunched, mere moments before placing a pint of milk in the exact left corner of my doormat, as they always would–a compulsive fellow I had often presumed that they were an exceptionally tedious person, such was the militant presentation of their uniform and milk cart.
‘Excuse me,’ I coughed in the polite yet assertive of a way of a person furious with the actions of another, ‘would you kindly get off the ground and explain yourself.’ I continued, emphasising the word kindly as if my sentence held it like lump hammer.
Without movement the Milkman stuttered, a flurry of repeated lines in triplicate. He appeared to be on a damaged piece of VHS film or broken analogue recorder, there was a dissonance to his composition that I could hardly believe possible. Reaching out I thought the better of touching the still frozen person and could only politely stammer, ‘as you were.’
Stepping around the distortion, I staggered out into my front garden and struggled to take in the morning around me. A pigeon, mottled and pluming of dust, crashed into the window of my study and then fell into the hedge without much complaint. An audible pop was then heard, as if from a speaker, as a second bird then clattered into the same window, a complete cycle of identical recursion.
*Thump, a third bird. *Thump a fourth. My neighbour’s yard, still covered by the darkness of nightfall, clattered against the fabric of day that my own stood in. I waved to the postman, the twelve of them waved back.
I am a man of reason.
It’s ok to panic when reality departs from its datum.
I leapt over my fence, pyjamas and all, and charged toward the milk cart abandoning any pretence of logic and only wishing to return to my bed. Straining against the wagon, myself and the garbage truck driver heaved mightily against the stationary vehicle, two humans engaged in an endeavour of single purpose.
‘The emergency break,’ I cried locking eyes with my comrade and gesturing toward the front seat.
Without grace, the garbage truck driver tumbled into driver’s seat and the cart promptly departed from existence.
‘Oh,’ I cried to the empty street and sky above.
Northing was normal, I lay upon a damp road and watched the moon shine down on the day below. The cart was gone but so was the garbage truck.
Picking myself up I turned and looked at the kerb of Ardent St, my two bins the only sentinels lining its flank. It was Tuesday, I’m sure it was Tuesday.
A small pile of dazed pigeons was beginning to populate within my hedge as I walked past and returned to bed. Normality was askew, I had gone outside and unravelled the loom while it was still being knit.
Laying down I stared at the ceiling for a while and attempted to collect my thoughts as a familiar rumble sounded out some thirty minutes from Ardent St. Placing a hand on the second composition of myself sitting up from his slumber, I muttered to them with a retiring yawn,
‘Don’t get up, it’s Bin Day.’
J.McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 