The Incinerator's Lament
word count: 1,791
Yuka huffed as she dropped her frayed duffle bag to her old bed. A combination of public transport and worn tennis shoes had returned her home for her first visit since starting college. Brushing aside her short, black locks, she smirked at her Hello Kitty comforter, and poster of Ran wrinkled in a corner, seeing them anew with brown eyes more experienced in the wide world outside her star-splattered door. Though her lips formed a frown when he noticed something missing.
"Mom, where's Mister Yojimbo?" Yuka inquired as she headed down the stairs into the bright, pristine kitchen where he mother was carving and slicing through vegetables in a furious tsunami that soon settled into two freshly made salads.
"That old stuffed bunny? I threw it out," the middle-aged woman idly replied, still brandishing a long knife like a samurai before a duel. Not a single raven hair was out of place, nor did a single seed or drop of juice marred her white apron.
"But that was a gift from grandma!" Yuka protested with clenched fists, though her father always lectured her about controlling her anger. He lived in another prefecture now, parting ways with mom once Yuka was old enough to stand on her own. The stuffed bunny had been a present from his mother, now deceased, and that made it obvious why it had been tossed to the curb.
Yuka's mother waited with knife in hand to continue this argument, but then came the characteristic 'beep beep' of the garbage truck from outside, collecting the burnable trash. Yuka turned and rushed for the window, catching a hint of white fur before it vanished into the yawning orifice of the vehicle below. The truck had already begun to pull away as she opened the window and leapt for the street. After all, it was only two stories below.
Yuka hit the road with knees bent, springing into a sprint as the truck rushed along the curbside, beeping and inhaling trash without stopping, or heeding her at all as she shouted, "Wait! Stop!"
It wasn't as fast as the local gold medalist for varsity track. Yuka had nearly reached the back of the foul-smelling contraption when it suddenly farted out a cloud of black smoke, shifting into a higher gear to zoom out onto the highway.
'Don't run on the highway,' Yuka's father had said to her more than once, sitting out by the edge and watching the sleek cars and bulky transports blur by, unable to tell where one ended and another began. Only her grandmother had let her do that.
Yuka took in a big breath, feeling the tension pass through her well toned muscles, glad she hadn't changed out of her light top, sweatpants, and best running shoes. She set her foot on the low rail, and leapt onto the roof of a speeding car, landing flat to keep the speed from tossing her aside. There was some muffled complaint from the passenger within, impossible to hear clearly with the wind screaming in her ears.
The garbage truck was already a half dozen vehicles ahead, and jockeying for position among the ten lanes of automated traffic. This flowed along on different bands that looped up and down, and occasionally crossed under or overhead. As a small child, she had always shut her eyes when they had gone on trips, but now they were only half closed against the harsh sun and howling wind.
Yuka bounded for the next vehicle, only to be smacked back by the rushing air, leaving her stumbling and slipping over the sleek surfaces of cars that whined with their pathetic little bleeps in protest, unable to do anything as they rushed towards their preprogrammed destinations. With the garbage truck already slipping out of sight, Yuka could only keep her head down and cross car after car in a bare run, occasionally fumbling and grasping to pull herself ahead, while making small hops as powerful leaps to compensate for this velocity.
"Like a rabbit," Yuka muttered to herself with a smile as she clung to the roof of a large black transport, having lost sight of the trash truck for a moment. That's what her grandmother had called her, usagi, and chose her to receive the stuffed animal that had been in her family for generations. She could not allow it to end up incinerated by the whims of her temperamental mother.
Then the garbage truck reappeared, but on a lane that rose over Yuka's head, and gradually sloped further into the calm sky. So the teenager gathered up an even greater breath, sucking in as much air as she could stand until her cheeks resembled two apples, leaping and unleashing her breath at the same time. Expelled air struck the wind, canceling it out for a moment. Long enough for Yuka to scramble more like a monkey up the side of the rising lane, and plant her feet on the pavement right in front of the garbage truck, knowing it's AI had to stop for obstructions.
Only it didn't. With another belch of dark smoke, the vehicle shook and leapt right over her head, altering in the air as the thick wheels vanished into the metal housing, growing stubby wings while large thrusters emerged. In a blast of fire and heat, it surged off into the sky, leaving behind a smoldering Yuka.
After cursing loud enough to scatter a flock of birds, Yuka bent low to the road and raced up the inclined lane faster than she had ever moved before. The bulky garbage truck wobbled uneasily in the air, but still slowly pulled ahead. Though the first real problem in how it drifted up higher and higher in the sky, already well out of reach. The second was the lane she was currently running on was about to come to an abrupt end.
Yuka didn't falter as she reached the lip of the upturned road, but vaulted directly into a sky thick with air traffic, and just barely grasping the single downturned thruster of a floating skylamp, which slowly began to sink earthward while sputtering and threatening to die. Yuka flinched more in fear of setting her hair ablaze, yanking it closer to the flow of aircraft before dropping with some relief to the canvas back of a truck loaded with produce, shuddering and coughing its way through the sky.
The gleaming megascrapers of a modern city rose up on either side of this main thoroughfare, some with parking bays and others with tunnels to let a trickle of traffic pass through. Even though it was slower here, the vehicles were also more spaced out than on the elevated freeway miles below. So Yuka had to strangle her own impatience as she hung low to the truck, bounding to the next vehicle heading roughly in the direction of her quarry.
Yuka didn't look down. She leapt from car to truck to transport, following the smell of refuse mixed among the fresh wind and stale exhaust. Her skin was covered in goosebumps from the cold while the thinner air made her feel lightheaded, but driven by love and familiar duty, she boldly jumped until she neared the rusted side of the garbage truck. Only for it to take a sudden nosedive towards the city dump now lying directly below.
"You're not getting away!" Yuka pledged against the wind as she dove after it headfirst, easily reaching it with her reckless dive set against its controlled descent, but nearly searing her own face as the back thrusters lit to life again, as if its tiny computer brain had finally gotten annoyed with this persistent human.
Yuka landed awkwardly on its metal shell, dazed and disorientated as the garbage truck righted itself. So she was left to cling on and watch as it dumped its mostly unwanted cargo, including a hint of white fur, into the vastness below. She could only fall after it.
Thick globs splattered Yuka as she landed in slime, rolling onto a bed of junk full of bright plastic packaging and clunky electronics of every shape and form. The stench was unbearable, forcing her to pull up the collar of her shirt, though the foul odor had already sunk right into the fabric. Hills of debris littered the landscape, with more raining down from above, though floating fearlessly among this hail of rubbish, robots sorted out the burnable and recyclable, sending them on floating platforms downstream.
So Yuka rushed alongside this bubbling river of muck to arrive at a massive construction of steel with smokestacks bound on either side. It resembled a blocky octopus, with its tentacles ending in ports where the cargo of the river flowed in, included the familiar stuffed samurai bunny. The body of the incinerator was a massive mouth surrounded by bolts, and raging with an inferno to burn all it touched. That was something Yuka couldn't allow.
Tearing free the hood of a broken car, she scooped up the muck of the river and hurled it towards the blaze, only for a smokestack to pull itself from the ground, and knock aside this wet blob, flexing steel beams as fingers. Then the incinerator ripped the other smokestack free, grabbing a great handful of trash to hurl at this disrespectful human.
Yuka stood her ground, yanking out a dented axle to swing and smash the ball of rubbish into a thousand scattered pieces. Though that was only a distraction, as the first hand suddenly seized her in a crushing grip she couldn't shake free. She struggled and resisted as this creaking mechanism of ash-covered steel brought her close to the inferno. She just started to feel the heat on her face when suddenly this towering robot froze.
Then from within came the sound of steel slicing steel with the rapid pace of a machine gun, leaving the incinerator shuddering and gasping as its fire wavered. It reached back with its free hand, only for that arm to fall to the trash, shoulder joint severed from within. Soon the other arm fell, leaving Yuka freeing herself from numb fingers in time to see great gouges appear all over its frame, until she caught sight of a great sword swing that snuffed out its internal fire.
So the incinerator exploded outwards in a burst of metal bits that left Yuka untouched. All that remained was a pile of unburned trash, and a bunny in samurai garb at the summit, with glassy eyes staring vacantly up at the calm sky.
"Oh, Mister Yojimbo. Can't you ever keep out of trouble?" Yuka exclaimed in delight as she held the stuffed animal close, ash falling from the hilt of its sheathed sword.
