Hey you.
I've been thinking a lot about how unbelievably different all our experiences are, even when we experience things in groups or as a collective.
(Are we friends on Threads?)
We chafe against the idea that lots of things can be true at one time, even when we think we are open-minded, but it makes sense neurologically that we would want to maintain the mental status quo. It's a measure of energy conversation, plain and simple.
It's become glaringly apparent when I speak to people lately who has more or less of this perspective. The more experiences I have in this way the more I think about the Green Trash Can.
The Green Trash Can is a piece of Flash Fiction that I wrote, and I am going to share it with you today. Flash fiction is very short fiction, usually under 1200 (some say 750!) words. This particular piece is 1050, if you're counting ;)
Let me know what you think. I hope that this story helps you to see how everyone is telling the truth as they see it, and that there are more sides to a story than yours, mine, and the truth.
There's your truth, my truth, the unobserved truth, the spin, the memory, and and and.
The Green Trash Can
At 7:45 a.m., Rhonda Overwood wheeled the green trash bin down the driveway of her brick 3/2, located directly in front of the stop sign at a busy three-way crossing in East Atlanta. Neighborhood cars stopped, glanced, and started again, over and over, all day long in front of the Overwood house. Rhonda aligned the bin neatly with the mailbox and the "IN THIS HOUSE" yard sign with its non-threatening sans serif promises. She walked back up the driveway, tucked herself into her charcoal Subaru, and drove to work.
At 8:20 a.m., the DeKalb County Sanitation Services truck stopped in the center of the busy three-way intersection. The crew scrambled off the back in their thick jumpsuits and neon yellow toboggans to collect the cans belonging to the Overwoods and their neighbors. The truck’s metal arm gripped, flung, flipped, and slammed each one, leaving the crew to drag the bins back and forth. Beginning and end. They were equally careful about both—which is to say, the bins were often flung rather than set down gently.
At 8:22 a.m., the truck turned onto the next street and started the refuse collection there. The flow of traffic resumed, like blood after a tourniquet is removed.
At 9:07 a.m., Martin Ferguson was searching for the perfect Spotify playlist to fit his vibe. His son had introduced him to streaming music and the word "vibe" over Christmas break, and he was desperate to incorporate these cool new things into his general presentation as soon as possible—even if that meant mixing something not quite the same temperature and shocking the confection, like a drop of cold water in melted chocolate. Because Martin was so busy trying to match the vibe, he did not see that he was too close to the curb as he turned past the stop sign in front of Rhonda Overwood’s brick house. His enormous Jeep fender nudged the green can just enough to rock it.
The March wind tipped the can plum over at 9:08 a.m., but Martin Ferguson was a third of a mile and a world away by then, having found a playlist called “Y’allternative Flannel Saturday Night Bonfire.” He wouldn’t later recall looking in the rearview mirror to see what he’d left behind.
At 12:17 p.m., a young mother and her three-year-old drove up to the three-way stop. The child, being the most observant person she had ever known, pointed out the felled trash can. Furthermore, he pointed out other people’s willingness to bump and jolt it rather than take the time to fully circumnavigate it—or put it right side up themselves.
The young woman, mindful (bordering on obsessed) with how her son was being taught to view the world and his place in it, realized she was obligated to pull into the parking lot of the church across the street from Rhonda Overwood’s brick house. And so, that is just what she did. As her son looked on from his car seat, she skipped across the intersection, picked up the green trash can, and slung it into place next to the gentrifier mailbox and the "I’m Not A Threat" sign.
The boy beamed at his mother as she darted back across the street and parking lot to the car. After they arrived at music school, this good deed would be all he would talk about for the entirety of his lesson.
Indeed, as soon as his father and older brother walked through the door before dinner, the encounter with Rhonda Overwood’s green trash can was the first thing he blurted about his day.
At 5:26 p.m., the same time the boy’s father and brother arrived home down the street, Shel Overwood stopped at the stop sign in front of his brick home, pulled through the intersection, and turned into his driveway. He walked down the path to collect the green trash can and wheeled it to the back of the house, out of sight.
As each of them sat down to dinner, they all told the truth about the green trash can.
Rhonda told Shel the truth: she had taken the green trash can down the driveway in the morning. He responded truthfully that yes, he had noticed and had wheeled it back up the driveway before he’d come into the house for dinner.
The sanitation professionals, scoured and hard-bristled from hot showers first at work, then again at home, sat down to eat. When the people they lived with asked, “How was work?” to a man they responded, “It was work.” And that was the truth.
Martin Ferguson called his son over a tray of Amy’s microwaveable macaroni and cheese to report that the day’s dash cam footage (a Christmas gift from his daughter, to whom he hadn’t spoken in months, now that he thought about it) revealed that the mysterious green streak across the Jeep’s fender was from brief contact with a trash bin. So, in truth, it was his fault all along—but no matter. Martin told his son he hadn’t noticed because he had just gotten into a vibe. Did his son want a link to the cool new playlist he’d found on Spotify?
The young woman listened quietly while the little boy recounted their act of heroism and daring with the green trash can, nodding along at the gravity of the situation as he wailed, “And they just kept bumping it! So what did we do?” She even acted as though she didn’t already know, looking at him with anticipation.
Her husband chuckled, tolerating the tale as long as he could stand it, and then cut the child off, turning his attention sharply and squarely to his older son. “How about you? Any trash can encounters today I should know about?” The two of them laughed and got up to scrape their plates.
It was the most significant part of one boy’s day and the least significant part of another’s. They went to bed that night, both under blankets of truth, made of different fibers altogether.
The green trash can sat behind Shelton and Rhonda Overwood’s brick home in the black wash of the March new moon under a white oak tree, holding all of their truths.
I hope your new year is going well so far, but even if it's not, remember that time means nothing and this year is merely a blip in the cosmosssssssss <3
M.
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