Chapter 9 - Reborn
When I awoke again, I wasn’t me anymore. There was no pulse. I did not need to breathe. And my body was transparent. I held a hand up and could see the trash underneath it.
Somehow, I was still here but now sitting upright in the same bin. My knees to my chest, surrounded by trash that whispered in my ears.
All the discards of life spoke to me, and their voices were loud. A banana peel told me about its missing innards. A receipt sobbed about being torn in half. And a cigarette butt begged me to suck on it with my sweet lips.
The bin itself? My last resting spot?
It was a casket that cradled my spirit–and all these other spirits–in the living world.
Humans would pass by and offload more trash into the dumpster. I recognised them, but they could not see me or even hear me.
At first, I thought I had gone mad. Maybe I had. The first time the rubbish truck came, I was picked up and collected. But a few hours after, I would fall asleep and would wake back up in the bin. I was trapped here. And it felt like forever.
Over time, days, weeks, months I managed to hold on to things within the bin and not allow them to be emptied with the rest of the trash. More discarded souls joined us along the way and told me all about how wondrous it was living in the afterlife.
“You weren’t discarded!” a Q-tip said. It was covered in earwax and some red liquid…probably blood. “You were merely transformed. This was a metamorphosis! A spiritual transition.”
“What am I? A ghostly butterfly?” I looked at it and was reminded of the newly added message on Q-tip packaging about not inserting them into the ear canal. Had this one been used and gone too far into someone's ear?
Another voice spoke, and I turned. “No, he’s a Grouch! A Bin-Spirit!” A mouldy ham baguette inside of a takeaway coffee cup said.
“I’m not grouchy!”
An empty vodka bottle clanged against the side of the bin. Its voice sounded cartoonish and goofy. “Not ‘grouchy’, a Grouch…Gawsh, they don’t make spirits like they used to! This one ain’t listening a darn bit.”
I misheard. “What’s that?”
“A spirit who lingers where they died.” The vodka bottle said smugly. “But the death has to be linked to a particularly violent action. Otherwise, you’d just be a lost soul. A drifter, sad and aimless. Like a sock missing its pair, chewed up by the dryer.”
“Charming.” I muttered and grabbed the soggy newspaper beside me and threw it at the bottle. My brain didn’t register at the time, but over eight years had passed.
“You died in a bin,” added a cracked makeup compact, its shattered mirror reflecting fragments of my new form.
I hadn’t seen my reflection since I was alive, and if I weren’t already dead, the sight would have made my heart stop.
I was completely translucent, and everything from my hair to my skin gave off a greenish hue.
My eyes had black rings around them, truly channelling my inner Fester Addams, and I looked entirely drained of all life.
Which duh? I was dead. But it still shocked me.
“How you died made you perfect grouch material. Reborn from rejection. Baptised in the garbage. Congratulations!”
Something inside me shattered.
“I don’t want to be a Grouch or a Bin-Spirit.” I groaned, trying to stand up in the pile of garbage bags, only to feel the weight of… nothing. No bones. No muscles to pull me along. But there was still resistance. Like I was glued to the bottom of the bin.
“I was just at the reservoir where Mark…” My eyes went wide, and my voice halted as I heard his name leave my mouth. “I wasn’t meant to die!”
“It really doesn’t matter what you want,” sneered the compact.
“What matters is what The Rot wants.”
A long silence stretched across the dumpster. I didn’t understand this place. And my brain could only take me back to my final few days of living. I could no longer remember much before that, just feelings. As if it were slowly decaying away like my body was.
I was at the reservoir, and Mark took my hand in a way that I could remember was kind. Gentle. I turned as he pulled me back, and I was happy…I remember feeling happiness.
I didn’t understand why I had been brought to this place. This new world wasn’t just filth and fragments; it was discarded memory.
Everything in this bin contained a story.
Including me.
I could still smell the heavy exhaust fumes from Mark’s Jeep. Hear his laugh through clenched teeth. Then, it flashed before my eyes.
The taste of copper in my mouth.
I held my fingers to my lips and then to my side. There was an ache in my ribs. But it was worse than my mortal injury.
It was shame. And it curled around me like a blanket I couldn’t unwrap from my body.
I should have fought back or screamed for help. Should have valued myself more and not ended up with someone like Mark. Should have never got in his Jeep that day. Scratch that, I should never have let him near me or let him fuck me so good I craved him.
I should never have let him cum in me.
But I knew that what we had, him being my boyfriend, wasn’t real. He used me.
Mark, hell, no one cared about me when I was a human. I was trash.
And the irony was, I was now a spirit that inhabited trash.
But I refused to allow myself to wallow in my grief over my death. My newfound friends Vodka Bottle, Q-Tip and Compact pulled me from my stupor and taught me all they knew of this rotted world.
Over the following days, I learnt the rules of The Rot or, as I liked to call it, The Rotted Hellscape known as the Afterlife.
Grouches weren’t just ghostly leftovers. We were echoes sharpened into weapons. The more shame, pain and betrayal we carried into our deaths, the stronger our form was. And I was powerful. Incredible, even.
The next time the bin was emptied, my afterlife world expanded. I learnt from Vodka Bottle about The Rot network–something I could travel through. I could move from bin to bin.
My first few jumps were wobbly, but soon I met other Bin-Spirits and traumatised souls. I was shown the extent of my abilities and learnt almost everything there was about being a Grouch.
We weren’t simply vestiges of brutal deaths–we get created when something within us refuses to decompose. That something is a hunger deep inside our soul.
Hungry for what? Vengeance.
Even though I no longer had a heart, I had an unfulfilled purpose.
Soon, I became more confident in my abilities that I could wander the streets and leave the bins for short periods.
These periods grew as I learnt I could hitch rides with litter along the street that would get caught up in the wind gusts.
I haunted backstreets and sewers.
I travelled aimlessly, long and wide, and watched the city move on as though I had never existed.
They all forgot about me.
That young boy named Eddy.
He died. He became what everyone called him.
Trash.
Trash now lived in the bins and spoke with rubbish. He made friends with crumpled paper, or used condoms thrown out with semen still in them.
His mother never found his body. Never looked for him.
And Mark?
Never found guilty of his murder, and got to move on entirely.
On one rainy night during my travels of the city, I caught a ride on an empty soda can rolling down a long hill. It and I landed on a small suburban street, and the can had made its way into a small garden with overgrown weeds.
As if fate had its way with me like everything else has had in my existence, this wasn’t any ordinary person’s home. I escaped the can and glided to the window, where I peered inside.
It was Mark. This was his home. But, Mark was much, much older than when I last saw him. Greying hair and wrinkled skin.
Time and the years out in the sun had weathered him. I pressed my hand against the glass. I wanted to get a better look at him.
Time stops mattering when you’re a spirit, so I hadn’t realised how much time had passed since I died. I would wager it had been twenty years by now. But I knew one thing. He didn’t deserve another day of happiness.
His contented look twisted something inside of me. It wasn’t just anger, but something deeper and more primal. Rage. And it just got worse as I was drawn back to the can, which started rolling away again, pulling me from his home.
I was reborn at that very moment. A new purpose.
I was going to haunt him.
Claw my way through inside his house, and I’d make him see me.
Then make him regret the day he ever murdered me.