Garbage — Stephen Dixon

Shaney Fleet is the owner of a working-class bar, and his problem is garbage. When a private hauler tries to coerce Shaney into purchasing collection services, he resists. Soon no hauler will remove his black-listed trash, and garbage that is not even his own begins to appear at his front door. Ultimately, his apartment is torched, his head bashed in, and his bar closed by the health department. In this well-wrought parable of modern urban life, literal garbage becomes a metaphor for the petty encumbrances, bureaucratic entanglements, and apparently insoluble problems that surround Shaney. As in the works of Kafka and Beckett, the mood is at once ominously threatening and irrepressibly comic.