Day 23

Waste not. Dig in a recycling bin for all of today’s materials.

The world is my oyster, and the scrap yard my land of fortitude.

Pat Brenner, knew no other life. To him there was no other life to know. He lived, breathed and would die in that scrap yard, full of rusty old cars, abandoned refrigerators, broken machines, and other disregarded junk. It wasn’t worth anything to anyone but him, but that didn’t bother him much. His life had become to him, perfect.
Now Pat wasn’t always a scraper. He had been born in a large city, far away from this country stuff that he was so fully immersed in now. He had a decent job at one point in his twenties, wore a suit, drove a fancy vehicle, took girls out on dates, but that was forty years ago. Pat was changed.

To him that alternative life never existed. Everything about it he had forgotten, except for her, of-course.

There is always a girl, is there not? Most of the time there is always more than one, but not for Pat Brenner. Pat only had one girl, and like I said that was forty years ago. But of-course he couldn’t forget her and her emerald green eyes. He also couldn’t forget how it ended. Night-time, darkness, rain, the blood on her polka dotted dress, death. He had killed her, not purposely mind you, but it was him none-the-less. He had been the one driving.
He had also been the one drinking, and the one to walk away scratch free from the scene. Into the pitch blackness of the night, away from it all, Pat Brenner fled never to return to that city again. He had taken the best thing about that city, and destroyed it. He had come here, to this scrap yard, and created his own life of fortitude, forever repaying his debts, and living with his burdens and recycling his frustration with the world into that land.