“Dump Truck Girl! Dump Truck Girl! Nobody loves you ‘cuz you smell like doo doo!”
A simple childhood taunt, but one that haunted her to this day. As she drove down the highway in her garbage truck, heading back to the landfill, the words echoed through her mind once more. Sometimes children were right – nobody loves a dump truck girl.
She thought back to the party last night, the charming young man who had brought her a drink, chatting amiably with her until that moment she always dreaded – he asked her what she did for a living. The look in his eyes when she replied that she was a sanitation engineer, the slight shuffle in his feet and the hasty retreat – she had seen it a million times before.
Instictively she downshifted as she approached the turn for the landfill. It was getting late – as usual she would most likely be the last one to finish her run. She turned into the dump, the truck rambling down the long dirt road to the current dumping site. She sighed, thinking about what she was going to do with her life. As her mother always told her, she wasn’t getting any younger.
The problem was she didn’t want to do anything else. She had known she had wanted to drive a dump truck since she was four years old, playing with her Tonka toys. It had been from that early infatuation those early childhood taunts had come.
She reached the dumping site, backed up to the edge of the ledge and in a few moments had emptied out her full load. Another day, another job done. The sun was just beginning to set and she was ready to spend another relaxing evening at home – alone. The thought filled her with a certain sadness.
As she was pulling into the lot to leave the truck, she noticed that there was another truck pulling in with her. Usually she was the only one here by this time. She pulled into a parking slot, the other pulled in beside her. She glanced into the window of her fellow truck, and caught the dazzling green eyes of the driver behind the wheel, gazing into hers. Electricity seemed to charge through the air between them, and she inhaled unexpectedly. What was this she was feeling? Had dump truck girl found her true love?
