First draft of a short story. Really, really drafty. Like to the point where there's not a plot yet. There's a theme and a character relationship. But that's all. This blog helps with insight into the process, remember, not a place to post wonderful finished products.

This is based on a true story.

Trash Day

I sit on the stoop next to the garbage bag. It bulges with the cancerous fumes of charred toast and sweaty lettuce. But I can’t take it to the curb yet. Corbin’s not here.

            The sky’s dark already because it’s winter, and I can hear a moth clicking against the orange bulb above me. I also hear my wife scraping dishes in the sink through the screen door. I should shut it so she doesn’t get cold, but Corbin will be here soon. I’ll close up the house then, and Corbin and I will take out our trashes together, he on his side of the fence and me on mine.

            “Laurence, I’m going to bed now. Are you coming in?”

            I turn to see my wife gridded in the door, her lips brushing the screen.

            I’ve never wanted to be a smoker so badly, to have an excuse to linger. “I’ll be in soon,” I say, “after I take out the trash.”

            When I make no move to stand, she says, “I don’t think he’s coming home tonight.” She slams the door.

            Sometimes I go to take out the trash and come home four hours later. If I try to deny a secret gay affair thinly disguised under trash day, it may make things worse, but Corbin and I aren’t like that. We just take the trash out at the same time. I can’t explain how it happens—we never plan it, never take it out on the same hour, but always land on our stoops within seconds of each other. Sometimes we point at one another in a knowing way, though I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be knowing. Other times I ask how his day went, and he tells me, really tells me.

            It’s only four paces from the stoop to the trash cans on the curb, but in four steps, he captures my attention. It could be only five days since last I saw him and he will have been to India and back. He’s been mining the lives of celebrities with a journalistic pen, or he’s been in prison for documenting the life of a corrupt ruler somewhere in Central America, or he’s been shadowing a double agent in the Middle East for his new book.

            Sometimes Corbin and I drop off our garbage and go down to the bar. Other times he tells me his stories as we wander the neighborhood, and we look though our memories at all the things that aren’t here anymore. The Irish pub, now a store that sells herbal teas and yoga mats. The cement lot where I taught my son to skateboard, now a dog park. My wife once asked if I wanted to leave this place. I said if Corbin ever left, I’d have no reason to stay.

The dark shape of Brian MacNoy comes up the sidewalk trailed by tobacco smoke and winter breath.

“How are you?” I ask.

            He turns and sees me under the porch light. He leans on my gate, nodding.

 “And young Amanda?”

Brian, Corbin, and I all take our kids to the subway in the morning. We’re called the Subway Fathers: Brian, the construction worker hundreds of feet off the ground without a harness; Corbin, the rockstar superhero reporter; and me, the middle school geography teacher. It’s funny how someone with a life like mine can be so unfailingly harmonized to these danger men. They say when women live together long enough, their menstrual cycles synchronize. I’ve lived next door to Corbin for twenty years. Maybe for men, it’s trash cycles.

 

            Brian sighs. “Amanda’s been accepted to a school for the gifted. She doesn’t want to go.”

            “Why?” I ask.

            “It’s your Sandy. They’re friends.”

            “Best friends. I’ve seen the bracelets.”

            He stomps out his cigarette. “It won’t last. You know how things are. They might have matching bracelets now, and meet every day at the subway with their dads, but the world will change around them.”

            “The cement lots become dog parks.”

            “And sometimes those changes mean that two lives so in sync will move apart.”

            I think about my own childhood friends, their adult faces I’ve never even seen. “You should enroll her,” I say.

            “Thank you.” He glances at the street. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

            “Waiting for Corbin. I’m worried something bad happened. We always take out the trash together.”

            He walks back and peeks into Corbin’s garbage can. “Corbin’s fine. He already took his trash out.”

            I’m off the porch, across the yard, and through the fence. I skid-stop at the curb, and Brian holds the lid open. There, warm with vegetable husks and chicken skin, a blue bag huddled in the bottom of the trash can.

“But…but we’ve never missed each other before,” I say.

A sudden wind shakes the trees, and Brian is distracted by the rustling, watching the dark shapes move above us like they are redrawing bits of our sky. “Well, hurry up,” he says. “Corbin won. Better get your bag in.”

I think of the trash man in the morning who’ll come to see two garbage cans with bags in them, looking just as though Corbin and I had our four hour walk around town. But we hadn’t.

Maybe things are changing. “Good night, Brian,” I say, and I go back to my porch and take the trash in.