"Trash" by Dawson Veitch
Trash
The house was impossible to recognize from the photo we were given: a one-story house with a basement, VanDyke green on the outside, covered in a blanket of leaves. Neighborhoods usually form an HOA and bill the owner before a cloak of kudzu can drag the building to Hell. Prevention wasn’t our concern.
“Four or five!” Harry peeked out the front door, waving to get my attention.
“What?”
“Level four or five–” he projected and pulled down his breathing mask– “we won’t know if it’s a five until we can get the inspector in.”
“Aye aye.” I put the truck in park, then stepped out.
No two houses had the same culture: smell, consistency, or pattern, but always the same cause. Harry said they all contained the same trash, over and over. The paradoxical disagreement of hoarding was a layered cake. Sometimes it was a monument, a eulogy, an archive, or a true hoard, but always something beneath.
The previous house was full of media, meticulously curated and labeled. A library upstairs with all the smells of cardboard and old Sharpies emanating from tight stacks of books. I ended up pocketing a brass letter opener in there. And everything downstairs, VHS tapes and compact discs crowned with dust: thousands of hours of sports, news, off-air shows, and movies, all with the commercial breaks still in between. The earliest recorded media in the house was July 6, 1997: A Sunday edition of The New York Times. Nothing interesting happened that day. I couldn’t shake the banality of the date, why then? What compelled them to start on that day?
“It’s compulsory,” Harry said, “they don’t really have a reason for it, a lot like chewing your fingernails. Ninety percent of the time it happens in generational homes. Fear of legacy.”
That last part was his hunch. Harry’s childhood home was built by his great-grandparents. The superstition stemmed from an overgrown sentimentality that his father developed after years of going in and out of the hospital. I don’t know why he connected the acquisition of a house to hoarding psychology in his head. We could never confirm if the hunch was true. The department only gave us the address and a couple of images of the chaos, no notes on the owner. Even though it was total nonsense, it seemed like a personal matter. I wouldn’t call him out on it.
“It’s compulsory,” Harry said, “they don’t really have a reason for it, a lot like chewing your fingernails. Ninety percent of the time it happens in generational homes. Fear of legacy.”
Harry motioned me inside as I walked up with the shovel. A blight-riddled vapor hung from the air, sour like milk. The house was full of trash, rot, and flies. My nausea convinced me to expect blooming rafflesias above us, dropping their stink. No, instead, cultures of mold clawed their way to the blades of the living room fan where they ate at the wood until it was limp and flaccid. Little gray fungal heads popped out from the credenza. The walls were a conglomerate of faux cobblestone and stained ochre drywall. We clung to the little handholds on the stone to keep our balance as we maneuvered our way inside.
“No way is this a level 4–” I flapped open a trash bag– “mold, mildew, rotting food by the kitchen—all that’s left is spent nucular fuel and then it's a job for the feds.”
“Nuclear,” Harry corrected.
“Right.”
We worked to clean out the foyer, shoveling the gangrenous slough into bags and tossing them into the dumpster outside. We were surgeons cutting away necrotic tissue, revealing the tile underneath, white slabs of bone. The foyer was mostly emptied when I saw a sparkle from within a stockpile in the middle. I looked at Harry, busy digging his shovel under trash bags leaking black fluid, then leaned over the pile. There was a hole wide enough for my arm. I reached in without thinking and immediately recoiled. My hand brushed against a cold, elastic tube, slimy and shifty grape skin, felt through the glove. But curiosity refused to retract my arm, so I leaned in, wincing, puckering, and imagining digging through the weft and weave of a man’s small intestine. At the bottom was a pointy shape of conchoidal strokes: an obsidian arrowhead. I plucked and slid it into my pocket nonchalantly. Harry noticed out of the corner of his eye.
“Drop it, dude,” he said, still shoveling.
“I’ll sanitize it when we’re on break.”
“No– I mean, yeah, it’s gross.” Harry paused and turned to look at me. “You know that’s not what I mean. It’s wrong to just take shit.”
A mild shame washed over me.
“You did that at the last house, too. I saw you take a letter opener and stuff it in your toolbox.”
“It’s all going in the dumpster anyways, might as well salvage something if it's cool,” I huffed, “another man’s trash is another man’s treasure, okay?”
“No need to raise your voice, man. I’m not gonna fight you on this. I just think you shouldn't steal, it feels really wrong for what we do.” He went back to shoveling. “Besides, that kind of ‘trash and treasure’ mentality is how people end up like this.”
An hour later we broke for lunch. I couldn’t stop thinking of the patterns of mold on the ceiling and the ones growing up from the now partially exposed carpet. It was a surprise with all the horror of a degloving. I looked at my sub sandwich, seeing stems of soft fuzz sprouting from the deflated oranges in the kitchen. I went for a bite, and the sweet, watery taste of tomato, upholstered the walls and roof of my mouth. There was an immediate bodily rejection and a dry heave. Harry laughed, then apologized for laughing. An aura of disapproval still hung in the air. I reached into my pocket to feel the surface of the arrowhead again. I don’t know why I took it. My sweaty thumb glided along the Acheulean edge, I thought: compulsory.
Dawson Veitch is a senior in Strategic Communications with a passion for telling stories. When not in class, he spends most of his time doing video editing or writing. When in his free time he likes to run, play D&D, sing, and cook. Dawson wants to write for television and continues to work on his own stories hoping they'll be on the big screen one day.