I've been working at Accent for five months now. Now that I look back on it, Hunts seems ages away. I worked there for three years, yet the memories are so few and so distant even though I know I had tons while I was there. In memory, I want to post some of the memories that I do have. I'm not sure if these are so much for you or for me, but I want to write them out before I lose them for good. Obviously, they're not all going to come to me at once, so I will share them as I remember them.
The first memory I will share is this:
The Mystery in the Dumpster
I arrived at Hunts at 3:15, the same time as I did everyday. I always showed up 15 minutes before my shift started so that I could smoke a cigarette and get my apron on and my hair up in a ponytail. This particular day, I got out of the car and suddenly a putrid stench hit my nose as soon as I stepped out of the car at the end of the parking lot. I had never smelled anything so terrible.
As I got closer the building, the stench only grew worse and worse. When I got to the back door where the employees came in, the smell was unbearable. Since I came in at 3:30, I was the second shift. As I opened the door into the employee section, I was curious to hear if anyone had anything else to say about the stench coming from our dumpster. As it turns out, it was all anyone was talking about.
Apparently the owner had pulled out a black trash bag out of the grease pit that morning with something obviously dead inside of it. It was all bloated when he found it. He poked it with something or another and popped it, but also found that inside the trash bag was yet another trash bag.
Before he left, his orders were that no one was to call the police or dig the bag out of the dumpster because he didn't want the media attention if it was what we all believed it was:
a dead child.
All throughout work, we couldn't stop talking about it. What if it was a dead baby? Someone should be punished. Why would someone bother putting anything else in two bags and throwing it in
our dumpster and not their own or one of some random apartment complex? It was all very fishy.
We were convinced that there was a dead child in that dumpster. None of us had ever smelled such a stench, and we had all been around that animal death smell before. We asked the manager multiple times throughout the day to let us find out what was in that dumpster after work, but she told us no each time. Those were the orders of the owner and she wasn't getting her ass busted for not listening to him.
The other two girls and I devised a plot. We all took plastic gloves that we generally used to make the banana splits and created a plan to solve this mystery once and for all. We were going to wait until everyone left and get the bag out of the dumpster. We were going to put the bag in the bed of her truck and take it over to the park to open and up and see what it was. The only problem with our plan was that if it were the dead child we believed that we would be moving evidence from the crime scene. We were prepared to do it none the less. We needed to know.
By the end of the work day, we were prepared to carry out our plan. Instead, our manager finally spoke up. She wanted to know about the mystery being in the dumpster and much as we did; she was just better at hiding it. She agreed to let us pull the bag out of the dumpster and check for ourselves.
We all did our end of the night business quicker than usual that night. Curiosity had consumed us all day and we wanted to get down to the answer. We finally finished mopping and headed outside.
Our manager came outside with us. Since I was the one who had the terrible sense of smell, (because of my septum piercing) I was put in charge of getting the bag and finding out what was inside. The dumpster was too tall. We found two crates: one for me to stand on and one to place the bag inside. I stood on the crate and pulled the bag out the dumpster. It was heavier than I had imagined it would be. More than likely this was because it had been soaking it grease all night from being mistakenly thrown into the grease pit.
I opened the first bag and the stench grew ten times stronger. Everyone winced and asked me what I saw. I saw nothing because there was still yet another bag. I was terrified of what I would see upon opening the second bag. I tore it just as I did the first.
The stench grew even more unbearable. Everyone was done and standing outside by this point. They wanted to know, too.
Inside the bag was not a child. It seemed to have fur, but not hair. I made sure to look well. Make sure that this was definitely an animal and not a child.
To this day, I am not sure what was in the bag, but I know it was not a child.
