Trash Talk - Chapter One
Who Greased the Garbage Guy by Thelonius Merlot, an imprint of tenderbastard.com
Chapter One – Trouble in Trubbletown
IT ALL STARTED WHEN THE DONKEY FARTED, not from meanness or spite, rather in protest of wretched working conditions, hauling insufferable cargo up and down Trubbletown’s once-thriving cobblestone boulevards and by-ways so in need of repair they made a street urchin’s knees buckle, Trubbletown’s troubles accompanied by the further detriment of being located at the edge of the world, where everything dropped off...literally, as it was well-known and avidly agreed then and now Earth was, is, and shall forever remain flatter than a CroMagnon's cranium. The donkey's name was Modestine, after the indentured beast Robert Louis Stevenson tramped France’s Cévennes region with for twelve days, a hundred and twenty miles in the summer of 1897, a journey as wretchedly-impoverished as Modestine’s spirit on the day of her fatal flatulation. The driver, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Crackhead, of which more will be learned later, lurched the reins away and to the right of the bombastic burro-blast, veering Modestine onto the sidewalk, donkey, driver, cart and contents bowling into and over a swaddle of temder-aged children on their way to the microchip factory two doors down. The driver was fined, the kids, dead and injured alike, dragged and dropped over the world’s edge. Modestine was led by an animal officer who didn’t know a pig from a poke, to a metal municipal shed. When the officer raised his pistol, Modestine flinched, the bullet ricocheted around the enclosure, and caught the officer square in the head. He went down and Modestine sauntered to the proverbially ‘greener pastures’ of the forest situated on a hillside above Trubbletown, Trubbletown being in a depression that encouraged everything nasty to dribble down to. Modestine will graze her days in that quiet tranqil until she is needed again in our story, no one bemoaning her absence, unlike Stevenson who, relinquishing his Modestine to another owner after their twelve days and a hundred and twenty miles, weeping openly for her company in beer halls and in private to the end of his days for their departing, sequestering himself to write in his bathrobe, on the isle of Fiji, in the presence of attending tropical females, gangrenous leg and a bottle of bathtub gin.
That’s how daylight found Trubbletown, forlorned in tragedy, festooned in misery and sorrow as great as a weeping Stevenson tipping a bottle of gin, tongue out, babbling, “Everything’s going to get going,” a silly outburst under any circumstances. Things would be downhill from there. - tenderbastard. om