He’s gone.
The alley is empty except for a naked me on my knees reaching up to nothing.
I sit there for a second, just stunned. Tears fall from my cheeks onto my naked thighs. The weight of last night and my life up to this point still imprints on my heart like a phantom hug.
“Eddy,” I say, longing to hear his voice again.
But a familiar beep-beep interrupts my grieving.
Fuck!
It’s the Sunday garbage collection. The truck’s pulling into the back-alley carpark. He hasn’t noticed me yet. But I am stark naked. And I will have the police called on me for sure if I don’t hurry and dress.
“Shit!” I spit, hopping my legs into my overall pants. I don’t bother doing the top of the janitor overalls up. I nearly twist an ankle as I pull on my singlet and duck behind the bin, scuttling towards the side path to the front. I probably look like a hungover rat in heat, but I don’t care. By the time I peeked around the corner, the truck had done its job and left for the next alleyway.
It's just me, the empty alley, and the memory of Eddy, who had been the best thing to happen to me.
Chapter 17-Trash Was His Treasure
Aweek’s passed since Eddy disappeared, practically evaporated into bin juice mist, and a week since my curse had been broken. I didn’t get hot under the collar staring at coffee stains on desks, or hard from the grease on a pizza box anymore.
I am free.
Yet, there is an emptiness inside me. The first thing I notice is the silence.
After I had nearly been caught by the rubbish truck, I went back inside the building. I didn’t forget to clean Claudia’s turmeric coffee stain on the carpeting near the reception desk. It didn’t last long. Everything kept reminding me of Eddy. I couldn’t stand being at work anymore. I had left and walked home to my apartment.
My mind used to ignite with arousal when I would come home to my filthy apartment. But the discarded trash I had accumulated during the time I had been cursed no longer tempted me.
It had been a strange quiet. The kind of quiet that wrapped around your chest like a corset and didn’t let you have a full breath.
I want nothing more than to turn back the clock to the day we met. Warn myself not to take up his offer and spend more time getting to know him. That cheeky, beautiful man in the bin.
Had I just dreamt it all? Had he even existed?
I had settled in. Over the next few nights, I cracked open the window in the lounge room, in case some lost ghost wanted to sneak in and take up home in my house. Haunt me back to life.
But nothing ever took up my offer. Not even a gust of wind, or a shadow. It’s like the universe forgot I had existed. Without the curse, everything had become still.
The air.
The trash.
Me.
I didn’t realise how much I had rearranged my life, my habits, around the blasted curse until now. There had been a trash bin by the bed containing my favourite items. A shrine of filth in the bathroom. A compost bin that wasn’t used for compost—it had been used for cum-covered tissues, folded with a similar respect a monk had to preserve sacred scrolls.
I had wanted nothing more than to clean it all up, ashamed of who I once was.
Now back to being an ordinary man, I had cleaned up. Scrubbing the floors, changing the dirty sheets, folding the laundry, getting rid of the jockstraps with my teeth indents in them and taking out the copious bags of trash to the bins. It helped only until I found reminders of him.
My mind flashed back to him sitting on the bin lid with his smug grin. Smirking as I ate my noodles, and I burnt my hand with the boiling water. Him cooling it with his strange binjuice ghostly sheen. Him crawling out of the bin, with that stupid look on his face like I had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
I felt the connection; the love we had shared without him even saying it. He had stared at me as if I was the sunrise he hadn’t seen in forty years. I freed him as much as he freed me.
Then, he was gone.
I hadn’t gone back to work for the rest of the week. I couldn’t face the office and the reminders. Instead, after I cleaned everything up, I had wandered the apartment in the last outfit I wore when he disappeared. Claudia kept blowing up my phone, asking how the weekend was, but I didn’t have the energy or desire to tell her. She must have been concerned, because as the days bled by with half-assed responses on my part, her texts grew more and more frequent. At some point, I had turned off my phone.
