Contributor: Rachel Scott
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Shuffling, shifting, toiling…lift grate, insert hose, wait, reverse. The Man Who Cleans Street Drains places fists on hips and contemplates the filth inhaled by the plastic elephant’s nose attached to its mechanized body. There has been the usual cacophony of degradation.
“Again? It’s disrupting traffic.”
“That smells like death.”
“Why can’t the city send him in the middle of the night?”
Out of sight, they mean, because it’s hardly respectable to earn a living through the removal of decomposing coffee cups and the corpses of vermin.
“Didn’t you go to college?” a peer with two mobile phones jeers in passing.
The Man Who Cleans Street Drains feels pity for his accuser’s manic pace and need to destroy in order to survive. There is no defensiveness, because a former CEO down the block refills soda machines,...
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Author:
Rachel Scott
