Marg got used to the smell after her first week on the job. Slinging the slick black garbage sacks into the oily maw of the truck all morning, she got so steeped in the stench that she ceased to notice it. It was like water: once you were in it, you were wet. The smells, like drenching rain, only bothered you if you had something to keep nice in the first place.

She tied up her waist-length dreads after Cal, the jerk-off, pretended to feed them into the chomper on her first day. Jack, who drove the truck, more kindly suggested she might want to consider restyling if she didn’t want to end up processed like meat through a grinder. But her dreads were the product of years, connecting her way back to Burning Mans (Men?) of yore. Another life. She’d rather chop off a leg.

The loose bags sagging into each other on the sidewalk she tossed straight into the chomper. Trash cans and recycling got slotted into the mechanical arms and lugged in a big metallic hug into the bowels of the truck, then dumped back down again, like a kid too big to get picked up for long.

Marg hustled to the next set of bins on the worn-out street, its townhouses faded from lack of care and grayed-out by a drizzle of rain. The buildings were mostly brick with concrete stoops; sometimes old people shuffled around out front and hobos, towing errant shopping carts, rooted through the trash. Anyone looking like they had a job tended to scurry in and out like mice after cheese, wearing the cheap suits of office drudgery. Marg knew they looked down on her, if they looked at all, yet she wouldn’t trade places. She didn’t like sitting still, feeling pinned down.

She set a can into the last empty slot on the truck and hit the lift button. As the arms hauled up their load and dumped the contents, something clinked out onto the sidewalk near Marg’s boots. Its glint caught her eye, and she bent to pick it up: a silver ring set with a small diamond. Marg turned it over awkwardly with her thick padded gloves. She looked up at the nearest house, which had a matt-black door and window-frames, recently painted, not peeling like most of the others. No-one was racing out after a missing ring, anyway.

“Come on bird nest, let’s move it,” Cal yelled as the truck lumbered up the street, leaving Marg in its wake, gawking.

Quickly she tugged off her glove and shoved the ring in her pocket, fumbling with the zipper to yank it closed before hustling on up the street to catch the blundering truck, which was gassing and steaming like an old bull elephant.

Later, when Marg returned to the high-rise apartment she’d occupied for the last three years, she sat down and pulled the ring out of her pocket. It winked at her weakly in the dim light. She tried to slide it on. It was too small for her ring finger, but it fit on her pinkie. She twirled it there for a moment, then pulled it off and sank back into the sofa, opening up her phone.

She swiped and tapped to a familiar profile, bracing for the usual self-flagellating burn that came from scrolling his photos: the man she’d loved with the woman he’d left her for, living their best lives. The woman who, in fact, he’d been with before he did Marg the courtesy of leaving. She’d got better lately at resisting the urge to torture herself, but the ring had reminded her, and lured her back.

To her disappointment, though, his feed hadn’t been updated much for several months. Taking time… said one of his posts, captioning a mountainscape with a trail of hug emojis and hang in there buddy comments – and one saying, girls come and go but beer is always there!

With a crackle of anticipation Marg sat up and clicked through to the girlfriend’s profile page. She saw, among her numerous public pictures, the woman draped around the shoulders, torso, and assorted other body parts of a bronzed, toned, tall, and very much different man.

“Wow,” she exhaled to herself, flopping back into the cushions. She felt giddy, but also oddly queasy. Marg realised she was still in her work clothes, faintly off-gassing the morning’s garbage, and headed for the shower, scooping up the diamond ring from the table.

In the bathroom she shucked off her clothes and rummaged in a drawer, coming up with a thin silver chain. She slid off the cheap charm that had swung from it and replaced it with the ring. Squinting down at herself, she attached the chain around her neck, and looked up at the mirror, at the person standing amid the rising steam, bare but for a glint of light resting just above her heart.

One woman’s trash… Marg thought, fingering the ring. Maybe the saying would prove true for one man’s trash, too.

*

Bethany Swett works for a tech company by day and writes fiction the rest of the time. She has published short stories in Lilith, Quick Fiction, Bayou Magazine, 365 Tomorrows, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver, Colorado, with her dog Sushi.