Gary’s Magic Trashcan by Peter Biles

He wasn’t a special man. He was just a guy with an above average trashcan. It might merit an even higher title than “above average.” Consider it magical. Yes, magical.

Gary was taking the so-called trash out at the end of the driveway when the first softball-sized chunk of hail exploded on the street nigh ten feet away from him. It wasn’t even raining, which was what mostly made this intrusion so weird. All he could do at first was stare at the spinning shards of ice and wonder if maybe he was wrong, and that aliens were real and maybe were shedding some lighting equipment as they blazed through the ionosphere. And then he remembered it was March, and the glimpse of the forecast on the TV in the dentist’s office earlier that day, and that he was one of those middle-aged gentlemen who have to be careful, because crazy and coincidental things are likely to come for the very ones who least expect them.

The hail proceeded to thud dully on his front lawn and kerplunked right through the windshield of his 1997 Honda Accord, which already had hail damage long before he bought it for two thousand bucks from his uncle some ten years ago. He never got rid of it even though he could have afforded a newer ride. The car was his “friend” and he wasn’t an advocate for sudden change. A gut punch, watching the glass shatter. In addition, this crazy storm made him confront his own impending doom and forced a choice on him: To run the ten yards to the front door or to…the other option was closer. He forgot his crap on the sidewalk and hopped into the trashcan with a lot more limberness than he thought he had as a thirty-eight-year-old and closed the lid over his head. Luckily, the garbage truck had come earlier that day and spared him any need to squat on fresh garbage, but the smell still wasn’t all that endearing. Nonetheless, he was safe from the hail, which thundered on the lid as if someone pounded their fists on it, angry and spiteful and obsessed with giving someone a concussion. And it lasted for a good thirty minutes. He would stink like an old onion at this point, but hey, he wasn’t dead, and sometimes that’s all a guy can ask for. After the thirty minutes passed, and everybody’s windshields were shot through, and the lampposts all busted up from weatherly abuse, and a young runner was conked out somewhere in a ditch on the western side of town, bleeding from a temple but otherwise unharmed, and the hail had turned to heavy rain, leaking into the trash can, Gary dared to lift the lid and…

The rain stopped. Or rather, everything changed. Or maybe, no…he wasn’t on planet Earth anymore? Hmm. This couldn’t be right. He was in a desert. There were red buttes in the distance and tumbleweed, yes, tumbleweed, bobbing like little dirty clouds over the burnt-orange flatland. And in the distance, way off, stretched a little purple belt of mountains, white-topped with snow but so far off that they might’ve been privy to another state. Gary scratched his head. Oh dear.

He worked remotely as a software engineer and had recently thought about asking Mindy, the woman with whom he’d shared two successful dates, on an excursion to some national park to give the impression that he was outdoorsy. This wasn’t quite the scenario he was looking for, though. He’d hoped to drive there, for one thing. He’d also hoped to be with Mindy, that beautiful cardiologist who had just moved to So-Cal from the frigid twin cities in Minnesota. He also didn’t know in what universe one might travel via trashcan, or how such a thing was conceivable, and so figured that he’d fallen asleep during the hailstorm and would soon wake up from the dream. Other than that, maybe he was simply dead, and this was the intermediary wasteland on the other side of the veil. Right now, though, he just stood straight up in his trashcan looking back and forth, frowning; he wasn’t far from a ragged two-lane highway. He got out of the trashcan and walked to the shoulder of the road, peering up and down it for any sign of an oncoming car, anything at all. All he got were the trippy mirages at either end of the road, rippling in the heat, and a bright red flash (a roadrunner?) that darted out of the sage, there one moment, gone the next. Hmm.  

It was only when the Martian creature, a gaunt green thing with beady eyes and a laser gun, naked like a baby, appeared behind a rock and cocked its head that Gary knew—oh man—knew, that he wasn’t merely somewhere northeast of Sedona.

He ducked back into the trashcan as the Martian, or whatever planetary creature it was, shot pellets from what looked like an unnecessarily fancy Nerf gun at his general direction and crackled with terror. The gunshots sounded like the hail on the blue plastic trashcan, thunderous, designed to kill (in the way a BB gun can kill a mouse). One minute, two minutes, five…the pelting finally stopped and Gary dared to raise the lid and peek over the edge of the can.

Huh. There was his front yard covered with softball-sized chunks of hail, his Honda with its glass all shot through, his lawn chair on the front porch and the Gatorade bottle still setting in the cupholder pocket, the flattened irises on the edge of the house that his mother helped him plant when he first moved into the place; there was the pale gray sky above him and a deep sort of silence all around him. No one drove up and down the quiet avenue. No green alien popped up behind a fence. But this world was suddenly an alien to him, too, familiar but bizarre, beaten and bruised by the maelstrom, slightly altered, and beautiful. Who would’ve thunk? And he was standing in a trashcan of all places, having gone to another planet and back in five minutes’ time. How fast it can all change, this little life. What it could it all mean? He didn’t know. He was only happy to see it all, happier to see it more than he’d ever been in his life.

Peter Biles

Image: Trashcans – or wheelie bins one red and one yellow from pixabay.com