Recycling

Sue woke up with a jolt. She threw on her dressing gown and rushed outside, hoping that she hadn’t left it too late. She'd forgotten to put the bins out.

She grabbed one wheelie bin, wheeled it down the driveway and out onto the road. It was a constant irritation that the bin men wouldn’t come up her driveway to collect it, when it was always conspicuously there, but they didn’t. She had even confronted one of them about it, but he’d just said in a dismissive cockney yawp that no can do love, not insured isn’t it.

Having deposited the bin, she looked down along her quiet suburban road. The bins were all lined up neatly, undisturbed. This was a reliable indication that they hadn’t been yet. Usually they left the bins in terrible disarray, almost wilfully parking them in the middle of driveways when they were emptied.

Just last week, she saw her next door neighbour, Terry, a man in his sixties, slam his brakes on in the middle of the street when he almost ran into his bin, forcing the car behind to swerve around him, only narrowly avoiding an accident. When he got out, the normally mild-mannered gentleman was spitting and cursing and fuming and generally turning the air blue. She’d done the same thing herself on more than one occasion.

It had gotten to the point where everything about the bins irritated her, hence her alarm when she woke up this morning and realised she hadn’t put them out. This anxiety was also no doubt responsible for the procrastinating of the previous evening which had seen her sabotage herself by forgetting to put the bin out in the first place.

Pulling her dressing gown tight about herself she turned back to get the blue recycling bin. But stopped. She peered at it, one eyebrow rising. The recycling bin appeared to have changed colour over night. It was no longer blue, but green.

She looked over at Terry’s house and noticed that he didn’t seem to have put his recycling bin out. Now if there’s one thing she knew about Terry, it’s that he was a very keen recycler. The old man must have forgotten, and she knew that he would be very upset with himself if he came back to find it still there, unemptied. So she stepped over the small fence that divided his driveway from hers and went up the side passage where his bin was kept.

Strange, she thought, upon noticing that his bin was also green, the council must have sent new bins the previous evening. But why would they order new bins? Just for a change of colour? Still, the council had been known to do less sensible things in the cause of spending out its annual budgets.

Terry’s side passage was dank and dark and chilly. Sue hugged herself, wishing she’d put on more than her dressing gown. A drip of very cold water fell down her neck and she looked up to see that his gutter was leaking. Shivering and shaking her head, she took hold of the bin, turned around and took a step back towards the street. Her arm jerked her backwards. Jesus, she thought, that’s one heavy bin, and turned around to grab it with both hands.
That’s when she noticed a shoe jutting out from underneath it. Terry must have dropped it while he was putting out the recycling. With a sigh, she bent down, picked up the shoe and lifted the lid of the bin.

The shoe dropped from her hand and fell to the floor with a dead slap.

The bin was full alright. Full right to the brim. And in the black plastic of the bulging refuse sack within, there was the clear impression of a face. The plastic distended to a pale brown where it stretched over a pair of horn-rim glasses, a bulbous nose and sharp cheeks. Terry’s face.

Sue staggered backwards, clutching at her chest and gasping for breath. Staggered out into the road, barely able to comprehend what she had seen. It didn’t make sense. What was she supposed to do? Her mind flashed from action to action without resolving on any one direction in particular. She should call the police, she thought. She should definitely call the police.

She reached into her pocket for her mobile, but then remembered that she was wearing her dressing gown. She looked around her in despair, hoping that there might be someone around, some other neighbour out walking their dog or something.

The suburban street was normally quiet. But there was nobody about at all. She couldn’t even hear the distant sound of traffic. And now that she looked, she noticed that outside each and every one of the near-identical houses up and down the road, only one bin had been left out. The landfill bin. There wasn’t a single recycling bin in sight. Not the old blue ones or the new green ones.

The bottom dropped out of Sue’s stomach. She didn’t know quite why. She couldn’t make rational sense of what the cause of this dread was. But it was a much greater dread than the shock and fear that she had felt upon opening Terry’s bin.

She ran back up her driveway towards the house. She needed to get her phone to call the police. But on the doorstep, something made her stop.

That's not where it's supposed to be.

The new green wheelie bin. Hovering in her peripheral vision. Right there beside her doorstep. Right next to her. She turned towards it with a queasy feeling, an unbearable tingling rising through her limbs.