Chaperoning Penelope around in her first time away from the Elvish Dales was not something I expected to spend my summer doing, but I couldn't complain about spending all my time with a slender redhead curious about everything she laid eyes on. Everything I took for granted was a kind of wonder to her and I did my best to bumble my way through a layman's explanation of electricity, the internet, the freeways, my car…. It was fun watching her gawk at the bright lights, loud noises, and fast-paced life of the city with her nose glued to the window. It was like she was a child despite being older than Ronnie Reagan.
Everything went surprisingly smoothly, especially considering I had no qualifications to be any sort of formal ambassador. Elves had the reputation of being snobs, but Penelope was breezy and everybody we ran into accommodated her stranger-in-a-strange-land routine well enough. The first real hiccup came after we grabbed a bite to eat and she was left befuddled by the plastic wrap covering her sandwich. She asked what she was supposed to do with it and I gave the only answer I knew. "Well, you just throw it away."
"What?" Penelope's eyes widened as she processed what I'd said. "What do you mean 'throw it away?'" she repeated the words back to me slowly as if it would help her comprehend this alien concept more clearly.
"Well, you toss it into the trashcan. That's where garbage goes when you're done with it."
She glared at the bin sitting in the corner of my kitchen. "What happens next? Tell me, human. You fill the can with your refuse, and then what?"
I scratched the back of my head, wondering where all this was leading to. "I take it out to the corner and the garbage truck comes and takes it away."
"To where? Where does it all go? What becomes of the things you 'throw away'?"
"I don't know, really. I've never thought about it. It all goes to the dump, I guess. There's landfills or something and, I think, maybe they burn it somewhere."
Penelope's face stiffened and her lips went thin. She took me by the hand, dragging me towards the door. "Take me to this 'dump.'"
***
Seagulls squawked, drifting in lazy circles as we made our way past the chain link fence and approached the mountains of trash piled high. Penelope surveyed the sprawling sea of plastic bottles, crumpled food wrappers, moldy bits of half-eaten meals long past their expiration dates, mangled aluminum and steel hulks that used to be cars, bikes twisted into nightmarish pretzels, appliances, rotting sofas, splintered armchairs, decomposing mattresses, and smashed TVs — the detritus and discards of humanity, waste heaped high upon waste, all of it reeking under the summer sun. She regarded it as one might a mass grave.
After what felt like too long of letting her stew in silence, I put a hand to her shoulder. "You… uh, okay, Nel? I get that this is shocking to you, but it's just one of those things that can't be helped…"
Her mouth flew open, letting out an ugly, childish cry. She sobbed in wracking bursts, wailing like a baby. I wracked my brain thinking of what I could say or do to comfort her.
Her perspective was so foreign to my own. Garbage dumps were just one of those facts of life I never questioned, like the sky being blue or politicians being corrupt. Yeah, it wasn't pretty to look at, it stank, and I could see why it was upsetting to her, but what could any of us do about it? This was the way things were.
Penelope pulled away from me, still sniveling, snatched up a tattered plastic bag, and began stuffing with whatever she could wrap her delicate, pale fingers around.
"Nel…" I sighed. "C'mon. You can't clean all this up by yourself. Who knows where that's been?" She ignored me, plucking trash at random. I didn't think she even had a coherent plan for what to do with any of it, it was just such an affront that compelled her to try to make it right. Elves lived a long, long time. In that moment, it seemed like she might really spend the next five hundred years cleaning this up.
Her shoulders trembled and shook. Her face was knotted up in some mix of frustration, determination, anger, and sadness. Was there a word in Elvish for existential despair? Even I realized the futility of trying to reason with her about all this, though. I grabbed another sack, joining in. For a while, neither of us spoke. We picked around, working by some unspoken logic that prioritized glass over plastic, metal over paper. The whole thing seemed pretty stupid if I looked at it objectively, two fools on a harebrained crusade to stem the torrent of human civilization's waste. At least we were going to be idiots together, and Penelope was cute as hell, even flustered as she was