When the township garbage men left the stinking bags right there in their bins, ripped open by chipmunks no less, the older one had come out in shorts, an Iron Maiden retro T-shirt, and black flip-flops to dump the filthy moisture all over the uneven asphalt. He sprayed it off with a garden hose, but it did nothing but spread the brown, stinking water farther down the alley connecting the back yard fences and small garages of everyone who lived on Ellswood and Federal Streets. There were chicken bones, rotted cherry tomatoes, and rank pieces of spotted lettuce littered into the crevice made by Jenny Walshberg’s back garden bordering stones, and hair-clotted cue-tips and cotton balls floating in a trench that ran behind Hugh McMenomay’s grill area framed off by railroad ties with those pretty little planters on the top edge. The Reading boy had tossed the tattered bags back into the plastic trash cans and hauled them up the alley one at a time. He probably dumped them in the blue container they had at the park up the street, right next to the water fountain and the jungle gym.
