When the garbage men come to take the trash, they take bottles—plastic, glass. They take ceramics, whole—they take shards, too. They take leaves, green, yellow, brown; they take logs, twigs, sticks—brown. They take shoes, old, new, chewed up by dog not wanted anymore shoes—plastic, cotton, velcro, leather. Food. They take food. Yes they take food because we are few at home and two of us are having trouble eating (Mum and I); they take leftovers from today, the day before that, weeks of mould strands growing out of old bread like hair. They take it all even the stuff the dogs won’t eat—

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Carcasses, they take carcasses; rats’, cats’, dogs’ if you can fit them in and wheel that bin away from your entrance so that they don’t think the dead dog is yours, which most times it is. They take fleas, mites and roaches and those other things that crawl in house dust and on our skins (I heard we have mites on our faces). They take chewed up chicken, chewed up cow, chewed up goat spat up in a napkin because the goat was a smelly adolescent goat. They carry out all the bags they find— leather, plastic, paper. No one throws their money out with the trash, so I guess it's just stupid prizes—old watches, old phones, phone parts, buckleless belts, hemless skirts, soiled jeans, hankies people are too lazy to wash, socks rolled up into balls, others stiffened from use. They take parts. Car parts, fridge parts, the chord of your broken toaster. They take dead roses. Dead love?

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They take human body parts, hair—strands and dandruff, eyelashes falling at the wish of god, nail clippings, broken nails that ran into the corner of the bed, chewed up spat out nails catapulted into the air from the mouth by anxiety. Nails, from toes and fingers. All dead anyway. They take teeth, baby teeth, shards of tooth broken from falling or biting into cold roast maize. They take piss in bottles and things that smell and look like that. I have heard they take foetuses too. All of it. Just a bunch of shit. Smells like it too.

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We don’t know where they throw all the garbage. The lake. A swamp, a deep landfill? But what we do know is they separate the dry and the wet—the things that rot and things that don’t (the wet one is garbage, the dry one is trash). The garbage men take things back to the earth. Is there a difference between a garbage man and an undertaker?