Mrs. Pho
Share Article A female garbage collector rings a bell daily at 16:55 alerting residents in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their waste. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag autopsy material.
Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready, willing and able. She’s arranged her family’s consumption debris in two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink fat shreds. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does.
Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected, bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and long gone to be remembered infinitely with their stoic black and white ghost face images resting above glowing electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue and white lights on her family altar. It’s decorated with plastic flowers, fruit offerings and spirit food incense.
She hears her father whisper in her burning ear as he carried her away from their napalmed village during a war. She doesn’t remember which war. They were endless. Remember where you came from, he said. She never physically returned.
It didn’t matter which garbage bag went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled schizoid alley blocking sincere fading light, she tossed the bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing height pushed by a masked woman in a green city garbage vest.
The accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing exponentially it became part of the collective mess, their collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s civic mantra.
She was content knowing her contribution was not elaborate. Just enough to get her away from cold walls and plasma idiots to gossip with neighbors as cracks of white twilight filtered past musical hammers ... creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes
... marveling at this visual epiphany as 21 shovels of Earth were moved and manipulated this and that way by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities or laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from AIDS, exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers
... while hearing young Sapa Hmong children speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after grade eight reduced to selling handicrafts to tourists, their bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold winters as storms howled, Have mercy, Have mercy on the war weary inoculated objectivists savoring an inferno of their eternal nightmare now reduced to survival and No Exit save fate, death and dust inside a universal spiral.
A shattered mirror reflected her dignified stoic face.
To survive, a young migrant prostitute finished fucking a young migrant boy behind a corrugated curtain at a construction site. Plow my field buddy. She moved down a crooked alley to another construction site singing, nobody loves me but my mother and she could have been lying too. When she wasn’t screwing the quick and the dead she cooked food for laborers. This gave them the strength to handle her wildcat ways. She never slept alone being destiny’s child.
Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with rusty brown barbwire encircling his URL domain name and social media sites before easing past shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.
