Killer-Extras: Flash Fiction
Ronald Sering brings us a chilling tale down the dark alley of despair.
Dumpster Diving
By Ronald Sering
Jonah nearly missed the wad of duct tape in the corner of the Dumpster. The warm October sun shone at just the right angle into its grimy maw, highlighting the long strands of hair stuck to the tape. Duct tape is a common item, Jonah said to himself. It was nothing...but there was an unusual amount of it, tangled together in a loose, clump, about the size of a soccer ball. A little duct tape goes a long way. And portions of it were streaked with dark stains that looked, to him, like blood.
The alley in which Jonah made his discovery hosted a uniform row of Dumpsters, spaced at every other home. From within the nearest garage the Sunday football game played on the radio to the sound of hammering. Jim, getting quietly drunk while puttering in his garage. Jonah knew that Jim did not recycle his cans. The discarded mail he unearthed revealed a mortgage in arrears, a subscription to Car and Driver, and several prescriptions for a variety of ailments.
“Hey!”
Startled, Jonah turned to see Jim, framed in the opening of the gate leading from his back yard to the alley. He clutched a bag of trash in one meaty palm. Jonah eyed it with interest. “The hell you doing here again?” He made long, angry strides toward Jonah, who retained presence of mind enough to tear away a piece of the tape before retreating to his own yard. Jim shouted something angry at him, but his attention was fixed on the duct tape, the biggest clue yet to what had happened to his daughter.
“I found something,” Jonah said. Ellie, his wife of twenty-seven years, was reading the paper in the little room they called the TV room, which hadn’t held a TV set for years.
Ellie looked up at him with only the vaguest of interest. “What is it?” she said. It was the most that she had said to him since the day began.
His wife’s calm demeanor relaxed him, and he said, “Which paper are you reading?”
“December third,” she declared, “1999.”
“That was a good day.”
“Yes, Deedee’s nineteenth birthday.” Ellie’s expression darkened. “Has something happened? You mentioned the alley, has something happened in the alley?”
Deedee, their little girl, had been forbidden to enter the alley. Things happen there, Ellie had told her. Things happen to innocent boys and girls.
Jonah fought for the words that would soothe her, “no dear,” he said, forcing calm. “You just don’t worry. Not about anything.
Jonah retreated to the garage with the cordless phone. “I want to report something suspicious.”
“Is this an emergency?”
“Yes. I found clues. To a crime.” And he told them about the tape, the hair, and the stains on the outside. Within minutes, a tired and distracted officer examined the piece of tape. “This is what you called us about?”
“Yes, yes, see the stains!” Henry offered the piece that he had removed. The policeman studied it for a moment.
“It looks like paint.”
“Not paint. Blood.”
Arching his eyebrows, the policeman flexed and twisted the tape; bits of the material crackled and separated from it. He brushed it away with his thumb. “Sir, I think it’s paint.”
Henry freed the main wad of tape from the trash. “And there’s filmy stuff on it, someone’s skin.”
The officer watched him. “You’ve called us before. “Many times in fact. About things you find, in the Dumpsters.”
“I try to help.”
“Sir, I’m sure this is latex on the tape.” The policeman held out his own hands, onto which he had stretched disposable gloves. “Someone wore them while painting. The tape stuck to it and...Excuse me.”
The policeman listened to a stream of garbled words over his portable radio. Henry understood not a word, but the policeman listened with rapt interest, replied into the unit and glanced anxiously at his cruiser. “Sir, I have to go. I could take this in for analysis. If you want...”
“No.” He forced his lips into a smile. “You’re probably right. It’s nothing.”
Afterwards, Henry stood alone in the alley, the tape in his hand. He was on his own.
As Deedee had grown older, her desire to see the world beyond the tall fences had grown, and she declared that she would leave, go and learn about the life in the outside. You will not, Ellie had said. You will not.
And so the standoff had gone, until the night he had come home from work, Ellie in the TV room sobbing. Deedee was gone and something terrible had happened, and she would never come back.
Sleepless nights came often for him, and he spent them in the TV room, looking out at the alley. Sometimes he felt on the verge of some great realization. This he had interpreted to mean that finally the endless imaginings of what had happened to his daughter would end. The high, keening wail that always waited in his throat would finally cease.
Why have we stayed here for so long? he thought. But he knew the answer.
The alley was like a shore, onto which the discarded remnants of the city’s activity washed. Over the years he had found many things there. Henry kept the remaining piece of tape and entered his garage.
Down in one of the drawers, hidden beneath a layer of unused sandpaper, he kept the things that he had accumulated over the years: a child’s purse, a discarded box of razor blades, a comb. He added the piece of tape to the collection.
The clues were becoming more insistent, more obvious. “She’s coming back,” he said, his voice like escaped steam. “She’s coming back.”
Bio Bits:
Ronald Sering fled the maddening crowd for the Colorado
Rockies and lives there with his artist wife and beloved Jack Russell Terrier
MollieB.
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