The Garbage Kid

baby, trash bag, bus driver, chocolate cake    -miranda & brandon          

The first time Oscar stumbled across it, it was wrapped in a trash bag, wet and crying. He had peeled back the plastic layer by layer, had ripped open the red knot at the top of the bag and peered into the darkness to find a naked baby. It flailed its little baby arms. He called the police. 

Oscar thought they’d be able to figure it out on their own so that he could go home and have his Chef Boyardee and maybe a cigarette or two, but the movies were right. Cops were useless. They relied on Sherlock Holmes and teenage friend groups to solve the mysteries for them. Now they were relying on him, only he didn’t have a British doctor as a sidekick or a bag of Scooby Snacks to get him through the night. He was the burdened, unrecognized protagonist, shoved into an annoyingly loud police car. He did have to admit, though: it was slightly nice to feel like some sort of responsible hero, even if his heroism was accidental. Oscar felt this especially when the doctor tapped his shoulder and gently motioned at the Garbage Kid. If he hadn’t found it sooner, the doctor whispered in his ear, it would have died from suffocation.

Oscar knew all about suffocation, alright. He was a bus driver. He knew all about abandoned children too—that was the reality of the Bus Kids, most of them, anyway. After all, he never once saw their parents. Made sense—what a horde of entitled mobsters. They catapulted spitballs and chewed gum and never once read the “no eating in the bus” sign he had carefully taped up front. There was this one time that some fat kid carried a plate of chocolate cake and got it smashed into his face. Intentionally, of course. By a laughing group of idiot Bus Kids, of course. And Oscar, of course, just shook his head, turned up his music, and glanced longingly at the pack of Malboros on the dashboard. He would have given anything to puff a cloud of exhaled cigarette smoke in those bullies’ faces. Taste the suffocation yourselves, he would have sneered. But he was too much of a wimp to lose his job. He knew that.

Now there was a cloud of oxygenated Marlboro choking his lungs—puffing from the policeman’s mouth and being sucked into his own. It was like retribution for something Oscar had never done. 

“So you could sign the custody papers and then everyone could get the hell outta here,” proposed the policeman, who pulled the cigarette from his mouth with two sausage-sized fingers. He was right; it was already 4 a.m. the next day, but Oscar didn’t want to be harassed into having a Garbage Kid for a foster son. The Bus Kids taught him he never wanted kids, especially boys.

“Don’t you want to try looking for its parents first?” Oscar suggested. But the policeman only fake-laughed, another cloud of smoke escaping his mouth and nostrils.

“Look, man. His folks shoved him in a trash bag. You heard the doc, he woulda died. You really wanna leave him with them? Bad idea. Sign the goddamn papers; it’s past 4 a.m.”

Oscar agreed that it would be a bad idea, but things still didn’t line up. It was as if he was being punished for something the Garbage Kid’s parents had done. Or not done. “So shouldn’t we find them and make them responsible?” he grunted.

“Man—what was your name? Oswald? Just let the police do the police thing, and you do your thing. The kid’s still gotta live, yeah? Sign the paper or don’t sign the paper. We’ll just stick him in an orphanage.”

“Look, I smoke too, and smoking’s no good for baby lungs,” countered Oscar.

“Alright then, we’ll stick him in an orphanage, Oswald. Easy,” said the cop. “Chop chop, let’s get outta here.”

But Oscar, whose name wasn’t Oswald, didn’t know if it was all that easy. “Hold on,” he said. “Let me think this through.”

The cop flung the cigarette onto the ground in a dramatic display of fury, smushing it with the heel of his shoe. “For Chrissakes, man! I needa sleep!”

Oscar needed to sleep, too. It was almost 5 in the morning, he was craving a smoke, and his bus shift started in two hours. He couldn’t make a decision like this under so much pressure. He pushed the papers towards the cop and said, “Look, man, I need some time to think.”

The cop exasperatedly sighed, “It’s now or never, Oswald.”

“Name’s Oscar,” Oscar slurred as he shut his eyes tight and stuffed the pen into his pant pocket. “And take back your goddamn papers, I don’t want no Garbage Kid.” He was too much of a wimp to take care of something like that. 

Oscar stumbled out of the police station into the cold darkness, hoping to avoid a decision but knowing deep down that that was a decision in itself. He would have a lot of regrets in life, but this would be the one thing that would bring him the most misery when he looked back, years later.

Oscar bumbled down the street, the Garbage Kid’s wailing growing fainter and fainter. He fished the half-empty box of Marlboros from his pocket and chucked it in the bushes. Even with that, Oscar couldn’t get rid of that feeling of suffocation, which felt realer than any feeling ever before, as if he really was paying retribution for something he had done.