Silver and Salt(27)

Talking Trash



Griffin likes to keep things clean.

His clothes, the house, the car, his hair, anything in his general area. Neat, Trixa calls him; overly fastidious, Leo says…and, yeah, I know what fastidious means. Like I don’t? Like I have to have someone read the back of the cereal box for me? Ass. I know what breaking the fourth wall is, too. How ’bout that?

I got distracted, didn’t I? I do that. Never about the important things. On those I focus a little too much…or that’s what everyone tells me. I think they don’t focus enough, but forget it. That’s not the issue. I was talking about Griffin. He isn’t neat. He isn’t fastidious—seriously, don’t go there again, I mean it—nope, I know exactly what he is.

Psychotic.

I’ve had lots of people say that about me, but why they never see it in Griff, I don’t know. I knew, though, that it was the only explanation for him standing at the curb, dodging the legs that kicked frantically out of our garbage can as he glared at me with a look. Griffin has a shitload of looks—this one was his “Zeke has screwed up and it’s time to run through a puppies-versus-demons scenario again” Look. He grabbed the legs and addressed their owner…current owner, anyway, “Hold still. I’ll get you out in a second.” Then he hissed at me, “Trash goes in the garbage can, Zeke, not people.”

It was clear to me this guy was trash, but Griffin probably wanted to sort him into paper, plastic, glass, and human waste of space. See? Psychotic.

The trash masquerading as a man…or better yet, the *’s reply was muffled by his face being smashed against the bottom of the garbage can—it wasn’t the roomiest of garbage cans and the guy was over six feet tall, a little pudgy too. That’s not my fault. If you’re over six feet tall and don’t want to be shoved in a garbage can, you shouldn’t ask stupid questions. He’d asked a whole damn lot of stupid questions. “I called 911!” he yelled, and kept kicking.

I rolled my eyes and held up his cell phone. I made mistakes, but not a rookie one like that. Not that it would’ve mattered. The cops didn’t come to this part of town and weren’t going to unless the Army lent them a tank.

I’d like a tank. Tanks looked fun.

“Why?” Griffin asked, giving up on the disco-dancing legs, and spread his arms. “I go to the store for half an hour and I come back to find a man jammed into our garbage can. You were in the house. You couldn’t have seen him break any of the Big Ten. No stealing. No murdering. No lying. So, Zeke, tell me: why?”

Huh. I’d thought the reason I’d done it was pretty obvious. You couldn’t miss it. And people gave me shit about being in the dark. Unbelievable.

“Because you like things neat.” I frowned at him and his lack of appreciation. “Psychotically neat. He came in the house. He annoyed me. I threw him out. And when you throw things out, you put them in the trash.” I followed the rules and this was the thanks I got. Didn’t it just figure? Which was life. I follow the rules and then everyone gets upset because I follow them too much. How can you follow rules too much? They’re rules. It was in the damn dictionary. Being human is a pain in the ass. It really is. Worth it for Griffin…even if he was still giving me the look. Anything in the entire damn universe was worth Griffin, but there was no denying that this whole free will thing was aggravating as hell to get a grip on.

“Neat? Because I like things neat, you threw some man in the garbage.” He took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and folded his arms. “All right, this is going to be a good one, I can tell. Start at the beginning.”

By now I was figuring out that, again, I’d done something wrong. Same as that time I’d taken one of my guns and had gone after our neighbor, Mrs. Pepperhorn, three doors down who threw rocks at kids and dogs, keyed the cars on the block when she was wasted, and yelled at Griffin and me, calling us “goddamned perverts.” Maybe I had been wrong, okay, but it hadn’t my fault. I dozed off a lot in Eden House during Bible study. I really hadn’t known I’d mixed that up, that it was actually “you shall not suffer a witch to live.”

Bitch made more sense anyway. Witches never bothered me.

And Griffin caught me before I shot her. No harm, no foul was what I thought.

But people don’t always think the same as me, not even Griffin. He didn’t look as if he was simpatico with me now. That’s right, simpatico…another big word for Zeke. Yeah, I’ve got my eye on you. Don’t think I don’t. Now keep moving. The rest of the story is this way.

Jeeee-sus.

“He came…he asked annoying…never mind. Why did you let him in to begin with? You never let people in. They piss you off.” Griffin ducked as a shoe finally came off the foot of one thrashing leg to go flying. “Point in case.”

“I’m a census taker!” was the stifled but still loud answer from the garbage can.

“He said it was my civic duty.” And duty was the same as rules. You obeyed, more or less, if you could. “So I let him in. But then he started asking a lot of questions. How many people live here? How much money did we make? How are we related? Are we roommates? Are we significant others?” Significant how, I hadn’t figured out. Was it being the Chosen One like that douchebag Anakin in Star Wars? Or significant to some religious whacko who wanted to worship at my feet because I used to be an angel? It hadn’t mattered, because by then, “snooping bastard” overrode civic duty. “But he was nosy and I didn’t see any reason any of those things were his business.”