Free The Voices in Our Heads by Michael Aronovitz

and though the stench had finally blown off, Doris still considered the asphalt of the back alley to be contaminated. As a result, her own trash and recycling ritual had become rather involved, and every few days she’d added a feature even though she knew it was all rather obsessive. First were the plastic disposable gloves that brought up images of embarrassing physical exams, serial killers, and New York City perverts no matter what generation you hailed from. Next was the sacrifice of her pink Laverne and Shirley sneakers, banished outside now under the short overhang so she wouldn’t track Reading germs into the house, and then just for good measure she’d started rolling her jeans to the knee so the cuffs wouldn’t drag out there.
    Tonight she added a hairnet. She looked ridiculous, but who would be looking? She was just the nutty old broad across the way, and her son Michael hadn’t been a regular visitor since his father died five years back.
    Doris tied up the Glad bag, pulled it out with that particularly disgusting little wheeze of suction, rested it against the wall by the door, and then grabbed the mono bin with the plastic and bottles from under the sink. She strode across, flipped down the lock on the back door, and gave it a hip. Thunderheads had broken the four-day heat wave, but the air was an assault of humidity, all ghosted by a dark mist. It tasted like wet hay, and Doris broke a sweat. She shuffled out to the stoop, slipped her feet in her sneakers, and padded down the steps, arms spread like Jesus.
    She’d have to wash off the door lock in there now, because she’d touched the Glad bag before flipping the catch. She’d also have to take a shower if the trash bag or recycling container happened to brush her clothing out here because of the same twisted logic that made her wash her hands after throwing out the plastic gloves. Part of her knew this made no sense whatsoever, but she’d long surrendered to the fact that her will and intuition were both better served blindly than with what she offhandedly considered “masculine reasoning.”
    Doris made her way down the walk. She angled right to avoid the butterfly bush spilling onto the ancient, turn-buckled pavers, nudged open the wooden gate, slipped through to the back alley, and then she stepped in a puddle.
    For a bare moment it did not compute. There was no divot back here deep enough to hold this landmine of rainwater, for God’s sake, she had walked through here thousands of times before and never had an incident. The water was tepid, going about an inch past her ankle, and Doris bit back the scream that had been building inside her. Back here the lighting was especially poor, and she couldn’t really make out the booby-trap her foot had landed in, only that the surface had moving blotches, floaters. She pulled out and could feel something sticking to her bare Achilles heel. She dropped the bag, forced herself to set down the small recycling can as gently as possible, reached down, and picked off the leaf.
    Her glove touched her heel and she gave a short shriek.
    She approached the shadowed line of trash cans and fumbled through the rest in a blur. She pulled up the trash can lid, groped back for the bag, threw it in, and reset the top. She snapped off the outdoor recycling container’s wide cap, groped desperately for the little bin, now lost down in the shadows, finally found it, and dumped the contents, hating at least somewhere at the rear edge of her present horror and repulsion that loud glassy clunking that made her seem like the neighborhood lush.
    She returned the top to the container and stepped back. She was breathing heavily, and her whole body swarmed with what felt like thousands of microscopic vermin dancing in and out of her pores. All around her were vague shapes, rough chalk-like outlines colored black and deep gray, houses rising up in the background, Billy Franklin’s basketball net looming to the side like a dark