Your fingers tighten around the wire hook you use to pull cans from the deeper piles. For a moment even the landfill seems to lean closer. Then the sound comes again, muffled and weak.
“Help.”
You turn slowly and follow it behind a stack of warped cabinets and broken doors swollen from rain.
That is when you see the refrigerator.
It is old, green under the rust in places, laying on its side in the dirt as if somebody shoved it there to hide it among the other trash. A thick rope is tied around the handles in three hard loops. The door is dented inward near the top, and one corner bears a smear of something darker than mud.
Your skin goes cold despite the heat.
In the neighborhood where you live, people know certain warnings the way other children know nursery rhymes. Never go near a car with tinted windows and no plate. Never put your hand into a pile you have not kicked first. Never open a fridge or freezer alone.
Because sometimes children climb in and cannot get out.
Because sometimes drunk men sleep in strange places.
Because sometimes bad people use ordinary objects to finish ugly work.
You should run.
Every smart part of you says so. Find one of the older women. Find the foreman if he is sober enough to care. Find anybody bigger. But the sound inside the refrigerator is fading, and whatever is trapped in there does not have time for adults to debate whether saving them is worth the trouble.
You crouch beside the door and press your ear to the metal.
A body shifts weakly within.
There is breathing, harsh and broken, like someone dragging air through wet cloth. Then a voice, lower than before, scraped down to almost nothing. “Please.”
Your heart hits so hard against your ribs you think it might bruise.
You tug the rope once. It does not move. Whoever tied it knew how to make knots that bite.
You glance around.
