Waste Management

3 KATHERINE HILL WASTE MANAGEMENT I ’ve just finished giving the day’s last tour at the museum where I work when my husband, Burt, calls me on my cell. I’ve known this call would come for some time, because Burt doesn’t like confrontations, but I didn’t expect it would happen here, in the track-lit gallery on the second floor, amid cases of Maurice Sendak’s early sketches and interactive digital touchscreens . I hold the phone loosely to my ear, and he says what he has to say, which isn’t exactly what I’d imagined it would be, but then, I suppose nothing ever is. When the conversation is over, I press the red button on the nearest touchscreen and listen to Maurice Sendak describe his deep-seated childhood fear of being abducted like the Lindbergh baby, and his brother’s cruel rejoinder, “Who would ever want to kidnap you?” Moving, it turns out, isn’t hard. I hate leaving our house and its comfortably creaky front porch, but Burt makes sure to never be around, and I manage to get all my things out in a matter of days, staying in our bed, then when I can’t take that anymore, in a hotel room he pays for, until I’m done. Before I know it, I have a new place and a pile of empty cardboard boxes in the corner, waiting for me to flatten and dispose of them so that we can all get on with our lives. My new home is a thinly carpeted one bedroom that looks over an alley on one side and a street corner on the other. A sandwich shop and a number of stray cats share my dumpster, which I can see through my alley-side window. I have never before had such a cinematic view of a public dumpster, so on the first night in my new place, for lack of anything better to do, I sit on a stool with a mug of hot tea and watch it, half-hoping a criminal will dump a body there and my testimony will later send him to jail. No criminals come, just the cats, slithering around corners and jumping up on cans. I have almost given up on the show when a little woman in filthy kitchen whites Winner of the 2010 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Andrea Barrett colorado review 4 emerges from the back door of the sandwich shop and proceeds to dump a giant canister of food waste. I stand up, nearly scalding my hand, because I’m certain I see something splash into the open recycling bin, where I’ve been planning to take my boxes. She does it again the second night, and the third, leaving a trail of guts and bacteria, at which point I have to accept it as her routine, disgusted though I am. Of course I’ve brought this on myself. I’d have no problem if I hadn’t made a point of watching. Or if I had no boxes to toss. But I did, and I do, and now it’s clear I can’t go on living my life as I have before, now that I’ve seen what happens in dumpsters. In the end, I make the only sensible decision. I burn my boxes with dignity in the park. An elderly woman sits on a wooden bench near the entrance. It’s her bench: she’s been there every time I’ve come. She wears a hat with netting over her face, which makes her look like a man in drag. I pass her with my first stack of boxes, and she nods, as though approving my plan in advance. I set them up, still box-shaped, on the blacktop, making sure to keep away from the grass. When the smoke begins to rise in little curls from my fire, she calls over to me. “They’re going to see you from the street,” she says. She points to the row of houses on the far side of the park, where families live with dogs. A man shades his eyes from...