Hands. All I could feel were dozens of hands wrapped around, holding me down, keeping me from struggling. My eyes were covered with a musty rag from around someone's neck. I had seen one man from the tribe untie it from him, that's the why I know what it was and where it came from. But what happened thereafter, I could only use my sense of smell, ears, and the fleeting ability for touch and feel.
Scratchy hairs cut across my skin as they tie all four limbs down and together with what I could only assume was an old thick, and by the feel, jute, rope.
Suddenly I was flying. Floating above the ground in a very jumbled and bumpy flight to somewhere I had no clue.
Thud.
That was what my head smacking a hard bottom of some sort sounded like. I felt small, carpet-like hairs embedding their tangled patterns into the sides of my cheeks. Outdoor carpeting? Carpeting that had been repeatedly urinated on? The shit reeked like something horrendous, whatever the hell it was.
And then the darkness had been around me dropped to a whole new shade of black. Pitch black.
The air became stagnant around me as another thud vibrated through me. Crap, I think I'm in the trunk of a car. Trying to wiggle around to find an emergency release was no use- I was tied too tightly to wriggle, let alone jab or grab a lever. So, there I laid, waiting to arrive to wherever the hell it was the Garbage People were taking me.
I betrayed their trust- their number one tribe rule... I broke it, smashed it to smithereens in a matter of weeks. I coudn't be trusted anymore -and looking back, they realize I never could be. And now my future is in their hands.
They stood for the earth but when it came to human kind, well- fuck the man. Needless to reiterate this, but I was fucked.
Hours passed. I fell asleep. I don't know exactly how many hours passed until the car slowed and then stopped. Within a matter of seconds, my nostrils were sipping on new sweet scents of fresh oxygen as the trunk lid popped open and I was carried to only God knows where.
I am flying again- this time the final destination sticking me in a seated position. I felt a hard ovalish shape beneath my butt cheeks. I was propped up in a chair. The ties around my wrists and legs were being loosened and then re-tied. I wasn't being set free... they were just readjusting them, so I was tied to the damn chair.
The sun suddenly started streaming into my unprepared eyeballs as someone ripped the eye covering from my sweaty face. I whipped my head around trying to catch a glance of my perpetrator, but I saw no one. I heard someone but I couldn't see him.
He said, "Now you've been abandoned twice. We can only imagine you were a worthless, rotten, liar in your family too, and this is why they left you to starve. You weren't worth keeping alive. It's not our job to keep pieces of shit like you going so that you can grow up to be another unappreciative, deceitful bastard either. Struggle. Learn. And maybe through your pain you'll still have a chance at becoming a better person."
Then there were footsteps leaving. I turned my head and finally caught a glimpse of the back of one of the tribal leader's heads. What a fucking coward- leaving him- a kid- in the middle of a... what is this even ? My eyes shifted as I changed my focus to scoping out my surroundings. I was in what appeared to be some kind of old, abandoned factory or warehouse. Most of the windows were busted out, the walls were chalked full with graffiti and the stench of human excrement filled my nostrils once again. A world of shit and piss, I tell you.
And then I saw him. An elderly man with a long white beard hobbling towards me in ragged clothes and a make-shift cane.
"Well, hello there, son. I saw those guys that brought you here and hid. There's not a whole of defending left in this body of mine... but there sure is plenty of saving in it yet." He said with a smile brimming with excitement to make a new friend.
I returned the grin- this time would be different. This time I would keep the recyclable lies to myself and steer clear from the garbage.
"Are you hungry? I got some left-overs from the Italian restaurant down the road." The kind stranger offered.
"I'm starved. That's so nice of them to share their food with you."
As the man untied my hands and feet from the barely balancing chair, he responded, "Well, what they don't know won't hurt them, right? I mean, it was in their garbage anyways, so it's not like I was stealing from them."
Welp, there went my minute-long theory about staying out and away from the garbages.
Perhaps at heart, I was a Garbage Person. And maybe I always had been.