Recycled Emotions – Flash Fiction

He pushed his fingers through the thin black plastic carefully.  His nose wrinkled instinctively, waiting for a freshly putrid smell to smack him in the face.

Nothing.

It was dark in the small cramped space of the half-full dumpster, it made it difficult to separate the good junk from the bad.  He made his jagged opening a bit wider and saw faces staring up at him.  Beautiful faces with perfectly carved features staring up from shining magazine covers.

He smudged through them.  All women’s shit.  When he saw the stack he was hoping for a bit of porno or at least a lingerie catalog.  No one read mags anymore.

He tossed the stack aside and pawed for another overripe trash bag.

The stack of magazines toppled slowly, a waterfall of glossy pages sliding down over his feet. He reached down to move them aside and saw a familiar face looking up at him from one of the back covers.  The product was not important, but that face…

His eyes were suddenly moist.

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Advanced Settings

He had just begun to slipstream behind a massive 747 when the unfamiliar chiming brought him uncomfortably into waking.  He blinked his eyes, trying to get them to focus through the thick screen of sleep.  The room was dark but he could see the small rectangle of blue light on the table next to the bed.  It was pulsing slowly, the light bringing the shapes around it in and out of focus.  The ceramic lamp that shared the nightstand with the glowing phone began to throw ominous, looming shadows over his bed.