Chop. Hack. Push. All around me, the ground is vibrating and crumbling. Rocks shudder and slide, and I am doing the same. I see friends I’ve known for years tumble down a steep, gray hill. Pinpricks of light shoot into our warm cave until suddenly there is a large, gaping hole above me. I see rough, callused hands shoving my friends into dirty bags, and suddenly it is dark again and I am in the dirty bag, too. What do these huge, clumsy giants want from us?

After listening to faint rumbling for what seems like hours, the callused hands grab at us again and dump us into clear tubes. All around us are louder rumbling noises, along with squeaks and booms and shhhhhhh’s. Oh no. I feel a shadow coming over me and my fellow lumps of coal, which by now I have figured out that if there is darkness, there is danger. This is surely the end. Goodbye, friends, goodbye, warm caves. Something cold and hard presses onto me … and then I feel faint and everything goes black.

I’ve … woken up. How am I not dead? I am not the same, though, so maybe this is … a kind of heaven? I can’t think. Instead of being a gray lump I feel … swirly, moving, fluid, almost. As I look around, my friends are the same – liquid lumps. What are we all doing here? Why are we not in our warm cave that we’ve been in all our lives? Instead of the cold metal and rough sacks like I’ve gotten used to all day, something warm radiates above us. As I look up, it’s like the pinpricks of light that I saw when the giants took us away, just much, much larger. Maybe the heat is good, I think, since our cave is warm. The huge light gets closer and closer, and I’m thinking about how soon everything will be back to normal, and how this warm, sunny feeling should last forever. This is the last thing I think before everything goes black again.

When I wake up this time, I am not surprised to be alive because if I survived that cold, pressing thing I would definitely survive the familiar heat. This time, I am towering high. Higher than I’ve ever been, I am confident and sure of myself. Until I see that everyone else is the exact same height as me. Everything about them is exactly … like me. All of us have thin, stretchy skin that’s weirdly transparent. A colorful, papery necklace hangs from all of our necks. Suddenly, cold water rushes into my new, strange body. All around me, water shoots into all my changed friends. Loud roars fill this huge metal house as water is dumped into us. Just as suddenly, it stops. Small white lids that hurt my head are twisted on to us. How did I go from being a small gray lump to becoming long and clear? As I look out the window for some kind of escape, I see black, billowing smoke clouding a once blue sky. Weird. 

Now, those rough hands grab all of us once again in fistfuls. I can hear their stomps and loud guffawing. Being careful for once, they arrange us into rows and stacks in a stiff, stretchy blanket. It feels much warmer out here than it did when we were initially dumped into the bags. We get rolled onto a big smelly bus and I listen to the gentle rumbling for hours again. There is a tiny window by me, and as we drive away that thick black smoke is still there. 

Shoom. Bright, open air all around me. The huge light and warmth is everywhere. The giant’s big, booming voice says something to the others. They come running with their feet pounding the green grass beneath them and their sweaty hands grab all of us at once. One warm hand lifts me up and thankfully unscrews that hard hat I wore. Their huge features come closer and closer until all of a sudden the water is gone. Feeling free, I relax, until I fly through the air like those little winged blue things I’ve seen everywhere. With a splash instead of a thud, water surrounds me. But not just water. There are other objects like me everywhere, and other things too. Hard planks and stretchy bags float around. I see small animals bite at the trash and then choke on the stretchy material. Rushing sounds fill the air, and I lose all hope of ever seeing my home again. Everyone else clearly hasn’t been home in a long time, so I surely won’t make it back either. In tears, I hopelessly drift down this moving body of water, expecting to die.

I realized that I’ve fainted once again, and when I wake up, two more giants stand above me. Instead of being noisy and smelly, they are careful and watchful. The girl mumbles something to the other. She says things like plastic, cleanup, pollution, animals, and sickness. They scoop me and the other lost things up with huge nets and gloves. Instead of shoving us in a bag, they start to … fix us? They fix my shape and fill me with water again. A clear bag has food put into it. With some of the random shreds of colorful material, they build a little ornament with one and a house with another. When they hang the house, the little winged blue thing flies into it. There are others like me, and they fill us all up with clean water. Then they hand each of us to a different giant, and each one gratefully gulps the cool water. I wait to be thrown into the air once more, but this time, I am refilled and placed onto a high, cool shelf where I am used again and again as the weeks go by. 

What has become of me? I can’t tell if I’m bad or good. I’m not sure, but maybe that black smoke was … because of me. The making of me. I can’t change that hot smoke making the air warmer or the poor animal that ate the surrounding piece of trash. I can’t change what I didn’t choose, but I want to stay out of this problem despite being the reason the problem exists.

Image: Fewings, Nick. “Blue and white plastic pack lot.” Unsplash, 3 June 2020, https://unsplash.com/photos/blue-and-white-plastic-pack-lot-ywVgG0lDbOk