Blueprints of the Afterlife

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The world was full of precious garbage. Woo-jin passed through it on his way home from work, scanning the field at the end of the runway for aluminum cans, bits of copper wire, rare earth elements scavenged from junked computers. He found a beer box, but whoever’d left it hadn’t put the empties back in their cardboard cubicles. He kicked the box and swung a plastic bag of rescued leftovers from his finger. As a professional dishwasher he only rescued food from the trash when he was certain none of his coworkers would catch him. If they spotted the clamshell box on top of the Hobart washer they’d think it was an order somebody never picked up from the takeout window, and if they happened to see that the burger inside had a bite out of it, they’d think it was Woo-jin who had bitten the bite rather than it being a burger that had already had a bite taken out of it. He’d scraped this particular burger out of a plastic basket along with congealed gravy fries. Patsy, his foster sister, was going to want that burger, Woo-jin knew. He could either eat the burger and gravy fries now, in the field, and go home stuffed but not have to share with Patsy, or he could show up with the food and have Patsy yell at him about who needed the three-quarters of a burger the most. Patsy was always talking at him about how lucky he was with his job because of all the free food. If he showed up empty-handed she accused him of not bringing food home on purpose. The only times she was really grateful was when he’d bring home a whole pie. Usually the pie was apple, or rather rhubarb. Sometimes, when he had to decide between taking something home that both he and Patsy liked or something that only he liked, he went with what only he liked so he didn’t have to share.

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