Dark Places || ONC 2023

Chaos

There are several people in Janelle's life who think order should be made from chaos, both in the broad scheme of things and in Janelle's life more specifically.

Her house is a mess. Her hair, frizzy and brown is rarely ordered into neat cute curls. Her clothes, which should be  carefully chosen to accentuate curves that aren't really there, are instead picked from the laundry chair in the corner of her room. Her chosen field of research is profoundly chaotic. 

Janelle thrives in chaos. Anyway, she was never all that interested in order. She'd rather have understanding. Understanding about life, her friends, her good health, the flight path of bees, and the trash inside the 8-yard dumpster behind the fancy condos on Murphy Street.

"Four bottles of wine, a frozen vegan dinner, Wendy's takeout, popsicle sticks," Janelle's full list is five pages long and confusing as fuck. "Orange peels (should be composted), a broken DVD of Avatar-"

She's in a hurry. She only has half permission to be there. A befuddled administrative assistant said it would be fine, but she isn't exactly excited about the town's elites getting scared and calling the cops on her at two am. She also has an important date with a chaotic man she doesn't want to miss, next to a giant hole she really wants to understand.

"Five mason jars that smell like homemade pickles. What do rich people even get up to?" Janelle mumbles to herself as she kicks aside a soggy pillow on her quest across her blue tarp to get to a pile of discarded food cans (should be recycled). Janelle's PHD program is in garbology. Her passion is the things others throw away.

It's a follow up study to the one done by William Rathje, except she's looking closely at rural locations and the effects of online shopping on waste streams. It should be easy and interesting, except two months after she started, the Chester Park sinkhole opened and people started chucking their trash into that bottomless pit instead. It's much harder to understand a town's trash when she can't get to it.

Janelle drops to the ground, marks off every weight and volume of every category she's divided the Murphy Street Condo's garbage into, then she checks her watch. Doc Adam has probably wandered his way down to the sinkhole by now. He's looking for some understanding in his chaos. A different chaos than Janelle's. A bigger one in the grand scheme of things.

She shouldn't miss their date.

With a small groan— being 30 hit her like a ton of bricks— Janelle gets to her feet and rubs dirt from her hands. She should really be wearing gloves-- does wear gloves about half the time-- but she's lazy and kind of likes the visceral, dark, nasty aspects of her work. It resonates. Only this time she realizes she should have worn gloves. There's a scratch on the palm of her left hand. A cut not a half inch long and no deeper than one from a particularly prickly briar patch. It kinda stings.

Silently, like she does every time this happens, she rolodexes through all of her vaccines; Tetnus, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B for good measure. This cut will probably not kill her. It will probably not even remind her to wear gloves next time.

She has alcohol swabs in her car.

Janelle cleans up swiftly. It's way easier to dump trash back into the dumpster than it is to pull it out, then folds up her tarps, stacks her buckets, her scales and iPad, and gets back into her car.

Her Honda Civic is chaotic. As messy as a dumpster and only half the size. At least she understands this chaos. Half ADD and half a life of digging in trash. She can't help herself if she finds a cool thing here or there. She also can't help herself if she stops by Tim Horton's on her drive to the university every other morning and fogets to toss out her cup.

Adam's out by the giant gaping sinkhole in the park when Janelle gets there. He's been there almost every night for a month now. Hasn't jumped. Wouldn't be the first person if he did. People have been diving in there about once a month for the last two years hoping to find some kind of answers.