Summary: There's a recycling crisis in Sandrock, and Burgess knows he's the one to try and solve it.
Rating: G
Characters: Burgess, Pablo, Dan-bi
A/N: @perniciouslizard is my main. I just felt like messing around with character voices, so I wrote a bit of nothing for fun.
Word Count: 1337
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Once a month, Pablo’s mailbox was stuffed full of magazines. Most of them were popular fashion magazines from around the region, but a few were more “general interest.” Pablo always rolled his eyes and did air quotes when he said that, for reasons that Burgess thought must only be clear to super fancy people like Pablo and Amirah.
That didn’t matter. Pablo said he needed all those stacks of glossy paper to run his business, and Burgess had to trust him. They seemed to be kept next to the stations inside the salon, so there was no reason to think it was an elaborate scam to release more litter into the oasis and the surrounding areas. Pablo and Burgess had different priorities, but Burgess knew he wasn’t evil. He’d even seen Pablo pick up a bottle from the ground and toss it in the trash when he thought no one was watching.
The magazines were still a problem, though! “Accidental” litterings could happen, especially during a sandstorm. Burgess had watched, once, in horror, as one of the builder’s free roaming cats knocked down a recycling bin, got the secured lid off, and scattered the contents. Bits of junk had hit the wind and were out of sight before Burgess was able to make it down from the temple grounds.
“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” Burgess had set up a meeting at the Blue Moon to try and explain to Pablo why “reduce” took the primary spot in everyone’s favorite anti-trash slogan.
“I’m just one man, sweetheart,” Pablo said. “You can’t expect me to keep a full house entertained and ensure I’m paying proper attention to beautifying my customers. And if I leave them alone, they get bored and leave before everything’s set properly. Even the elderly transform into petulant children if you don’t give them something to look at while they’re waiting.”
Again, Burgess couldn’t argue about how Pablo ran his business. He still recalled very clearly the time a tourist fell asleep on a busy day and got locked in when Pablo closed up. When she woke up and realized she was in the dark and couldn’t figure out how to get out, everyone in town heard the stream of insults and cosmopolitan expletives coming from the salon when she found Pablo in his bedroom and woke him up. He had assumed she was a “fantastically coiffed robber.”
“Well, I guess if you’ve done everything can to follow the first and most sacred of the three R’s, then I guess...can you try reusing them?”
Pablo sighed. “Sometimes I rip them up if their ‘newest trends’ section is offensive enough. Plaids? This season? Really?” His voice was soft and gentle. “And after I burn the parts no one deserves to have to see, I give the rest of that magazine to the doctor for his bird.”
“You burn it?”
“Oh, just the worst parts. I promise. But I don’t think his bird uses enough paper in a month to take all of them. Maybe the town should think about investing in better locking lids on their garbage bins? Just an idea?” Pablo had an air of calm about him as he sipped his tea, but Burgess got the sense that he didn’t think any of this was his responsibility. But litter was everyone’s responsibility.
“I can apply for another grant, but Mayor Trudy says that garbage collection already takes twice as long since we added the old locks, and the animals have already figured out how to break into the cans, anyhow.” Burgess had ordered sand tea because it seemed like what everyone drank when they sat in the Blue Moon talking to Pablo. He hadn’t taken a sip yet. This was a difficult puzzle and he was determined to solve it. He sighed. “I guess using gene manipulation to create races of super intelligent mutant animals was another bad move on the old world’s part! Who could have guessed?”
“And they made them so ugly, too,” Pablo said, sympathetic. “Well, it seems like a more complicated problem then I realized.” He frowned. “Well, how about you just take them? Maybe your church could, I don’t know, distribute them to the fashion needy throughout the area? While you’re out there dropping off food and things, anyway.”
Burgess had to approve of charitable impulse, which made it difficult to turn down the offer. He felt a tiny be like this very serious problem of chronic littering – a problem Pablo had caused with his rampant magazine subscribing – was not being taken seriously. And maybe the problem was being foisted off onto him and the church. “Um, thanks! I’m sure all the people living in the depths of poverty on the edges of civilization could use...something to read?” Literacy rates fell dramatically the further people lived from any major city.
Pablo must have had the same thought. “They all have pretty pictures in them, too.”
He couldn’t figure out how to turn down the offer, so Burgess took the donation. He didn’t want to store them in with the more important things in church storage, so he kept them in a neat stack in the back of his dorm room. Whenever someone (usually Dan-bi) went on a charity run, they would take some along. They only ever took a couple, since food kind of took priority space-wise. It usually took a full season to distribute them.
The ranchers thanked the church for the “free TP,” but Dan-bi mentioned they all were dressing more colorfully when she visited again. “Farmer Ban asked me if he thought his shirt looked good on him, even though he’s a ‘winter,’ whatever that means.”
“Oh! Then he probably wants to wear different shades of blue? The quiz I took says I’m a spring and I should wear bright colors! Except I’m not sure I guessed my undertones right, and that’s a big deal, apparently.” Burgess had read every single magazine. It was difficult for him to have a piece of paper nearby and not read it. Plus, some of the magazines had surveys! And quizzes! “Maybe I’ll ask Pablo later.”
“I bet he’ll love that.” Dan-bi shoved a couple more magazines into her bag. “I think this might be your last season with these. I guess some of Fang’s patients started reading the scraps X was scattering around, and they spent less time trying to talk to him. So he’ll take the leftovers.”
That would probably just move the problem forward a couple more seasons, but Burgess was willing to accept a lot to get the distracting quizzes out of his direct eye line. “That’s great! But, oh no! What about Farmer Ban? If his love of fashion is just starting to blossom, I wouldn’t want to crush it before it had the chance to bloom!”
“I’ll save him a couple, Burgey-boy. Don’t worry.” She started to leave, and then ran back. “Oh, hey! This Friday! Babysitting? You up for it?”
“Oh, of course! It’s such an honor that-”
“Yeah thanks bye!” She was gone.
“Well...bye!” He called out the window.
Burgess knelt down next to the stack of magazines. “And goodbye to you, too, magazines with beautiful people on the cover!” He really would miss the quizzes, though, even if all the articles about getting a “summer body” made him feel kind of bad in a weird way he tried hard to not think about.
He heard a loud bang right outside the dorms and rapidly jogged out to find out what was making the noise. Coco was sitting on one of the dorm’s recycling bins, pecking at the elaborate lock the builder made for him to test out. Three pecks and it fell off. “Co Co--!” It flew away when it spotted Burgess.
“You can’t keep getting away with this!” He shook his fist at the sky. “I’m adding it to your fine!”
Man, everyone was just running away from him that night. He piled some rocks on the can and went back inside.
