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 bin juice 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.
For some days, I had laid on the couch and let the hours rot away, in hope I would too. I had woken up on the floor often. On some days, I had eaten dinner on the toilet. I watched the ceiling until my eyes burned. Nothing on my streaming services was good enough to distract me.
I had gotten lost in my thoughts about losing someone who wasn’t even meant to exist. Someone who had died decades before I had been born and yet made me feel more seen that any living person ever had. Someone who had been called “trash” but was absolutely a treasure.
I tried to jerk off to the memory of us when we finally had sex. Just to feel something. But my dick was like a taffy pole and wouldn’t cooperate.
Turns out my arousal, now no longer cursed, is dampened. I broke one curse but find myself with another.
Heartbreak.
I had longed. For him. And only wanted to be with him. My hands, porn, nothing did the trick.
Tonight, I hit a new low. It’s Friday. I open the fridge, and at the sight of rotting vegetables I had forgotten to use; I am reminded of him and burst into tears.
Then, just as I shut the fridge, there’s a knock at my door. I panic. For a second, I hope that somehow beyond reason he is there. I let my heart feel something foolish, because I deserve this… happiness.
I deserve happiness. Don’t I?
But my heart sinks as I open the door.
It’s Claudia. I’m surprised and happy to see her, of course, but disappointed for a split moment that she’s not Eddy.
She had brought me food—jam donuts, and a thermos which I think has soup—and a pack of tarot cards in a raccoon-shaped velvet pouch.
Her hair is braided with ribbon and feathers, and her eyes look at me with a kind of kindness that isn’t pity, its concern, and something even closer to love.
She’s dressed exactly how I imagined her outside of work: a sleek, elegant silhouette in flowing black, like a modern-day Morticia Addams, if Morticia shopped at occult thrift stores and moonlit markets.
A sheer lace shawl drapes over her shoulders, catching the light like spider silk, and a silver pendant glints at her throat. She’s all velvet and mystery, the kind of woman who smells faintly of ash and freshly burnt sage and always knows the right thing to say.
“Thank fuck you’re not dead. I would have had to eat all this by myself.”
Scratch that; maybe she doesn’t. I groan internally.
“Uh… thanks,” I reply as she steps inside like she lives here.
We don’t hug. We don’t need to. She just hands me a jam scroll and then sits cross-legged on my floor across from my couch like my house is her personal coven and she is the Supreme.
I sit on the floor across from her and smile as I take a bite of the donut.
I want to cry. It’s so delicious, beyond anything I can imagine. How long had I been without a proper bite to eat?
“So… what happened, Oscar?” She asks me, and my heart wrenches in two. I tell her everything.
“I miss him.” Finding myself admitting this after I finish explaining, my voice cracks somewhere in the middle, and I’m already holding back tears. “He was utterly, tragically… beautiful… and thoughtful in ways I didn’t even realise I needed.”
“You were in love with the Bin-Spirit.” She says, nodding as if that is the most normal thing in the world to happen.
Which maybe for our world now, it is. I don’t know what’s normal and not now.
Hell, all sorts of supernatural creatures are out in the open now, so why couldn’t I be in love with a ghost?
“I…I still am.”
Claudia takes out a candle that smells like rosemary and burnt sugar. She lights it. “Love like that doesn’t rot away, Oscar. It burrows its roots into you, deep. You grew from it, and that’s why your curse broke.”
She looks at me, and I can feel a tear streaking down my face. “I don’t know who I am now.”
She reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re the same man I met a year ago, who at least now won’t get hard over a coffee cup,” she says, and I let out a chuckle.
“You’re different now, though. Better. You’re softer, cleaner.
You let someone in behind the walls you put up.
Oscar, you let someone see you in all your trash and glory.
You saw them back, and it changed you. Both of you. ”
I don’t want to cry again. But the tears fall anyway.
And they come hard and ugly—I cry in that way when someone who is close to you is suddenly ripped from your life.
I cry like you do when you see a heartbreaking moment on a TV show, the kind that changes the show forever. I had been changed. Forever.
Soon, I run out of tears and all I’m doing is sobbing, but I’m so exhausted from everything. They’re leaking out of me like sap from a tree–slow, and quiet. Claudia passes me a tissue.
I blow my nose hard. We have our own little vigil for Eddy. The Bin-Spirit who changed me. The Grouch, who had been anything but grouchy. He had been full of life. Full of joy. Full of love.
And I? An uncursed man, but a man who wakes up crying.
That is enough for now.