The Bin

And here is the second of my two creative pieces for my first assessment, titled 'The Bin', it is an exercise in describing a character through the contents of their trash and in the process revealing something about them.

The Bin

It was early when I came that day. The clock struck at half past ten. I walked up to 224 Warrender Street, home of Mrs Bradshaw. Very few people came here, I’d always wondered why; it seemed to be quite a peaceful place. I knocked on the door. No reply. I knocked again. Still nothing. I eventually had to use my key to unlock the door.

No one was home. A note by the door read 'bins in back garden’, I proceeded through her house, I noted it was rather cluttered, she had obviously not been cleaning the night before. I stepped over various overturned chairs and stray clothes and noticed her windows had a tint yellow shade on them. I didn’t give this much thought and opened the back door. It was a cool morning and there was an unusually cold feel to the air. I should do this quickly, I thought, I’m already behind in schedule.

I took out my bin bag and opened the lid, the instant I did, like a shaken up bottle of cola, the bin started overflowing, this took me by surprise and I stepped back slightly. Spilling on to the floor were dozens of boxes of anti depressant pills, and there were more in the bin. The thing that struck me as odd about them was that some of them were either empty, half full or completely full, the correlation between the three was quite shocking. It’s as if she’d not decided whether to take them all or not.

I decided to investigate this bin further - I put the bag down and started to dig my through the bin, once I got to the end of seemingly never ending pill boxes, I saw another pile of cigarettes, many had been smoked to the core, the ends completely pitch black and burned, aside them lay many green, crunched up cigarette packs. When I’d seen all this, I can’t say I was that surprised when I saw the next pile, a load of empty glass bottles that were still labelled. All different types of alcohol. Ciders, beers, spirits, vodka, whiskey and, the most surprising of all – Absinthe. I’d seen very few of these in my time and its more worrying that there was more than one bottle of this.

Below them, there was an extreme and unusual amount of food. Banana skins, Apples and Pears eaten until they were almost falling apart, Orange peels, this naturally attracted the attention of many flies, I shooed them away. Lying next to these looking oddly out of place were – bizarrely – crushed cereal boxes with milk cartons next to them. They looked very out of place. I also noticed cracked egg shells and remembered the windows...

I put the lid back on the bin. Taken aback and openly shocked by the contents of this bin, I was quite scared just what on earth she is doing with herself now, the note claimed she was at work, but I thought she could be doing something much more serious...

Whilst contemplating, I tripped over something next to the bin – The paper recycling, which was quite odd considering most of the other recyclables just went straight to the landfill waste. I took a look and as far as I could see, it was completely full to the brim with papers, that may not be out of the ordinary but this literally only consisted of papers, ripped, scrunched up and some left untouchable. I scoured through them all, the sheer volume made me incapable of reading them all but the general gist was not a pleasant one, choruses of ‘FAT SHIT’, ‘FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE, ‘BIG NOSE’ (this statement proved common), ‘MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL AND PISS OFF’ screamed at me from the papers. There were even pictures, most were scribbled down unpleasant doodles, one I came across near the bottom caught my eye – it was a computer picture of an elephant, but what caught my eye even more was that it was covered in a minimal but noticeable stain of dark red, I sniffed it – though faint, it was unmistakeable...it was blood.

I carried on scrounging and sure enough – all of the papers below this were stained in red, getting clearer and clearer as I went down, and then my wrist hit something....

It felt like metal. Hard, cold yet with a slightly creased feel, I tried to get a grip on it and pulled it up thorugh the mound of papers and there in my hands was a blood stained, dented crowbar which had been used....