Beep! Beep!
Even without ears, Ryan "heard" sounds in an odd, muffled manner as if had his head wrapped in cotton. As he listened to the occasional beeps and the sound of something loud and mechanical, he wondered when Cy would find him and end the nightmare.
Overnight, as he rested helplessly among the other detritus tossed by the Jones family into the garbage — Cy's mother had purposefully thrown out her son's soiled jockstrap with the intent of purchasing him a brand-new replacement — Ryan had heard other scary sounds. Scratching on the exterior of the plastic trash container. He had feared it might be a large dog, or perhaps a raccoon. His dad was always battling raccoons for their overnight garbage-scattering raids. Ryan the jockstrap had quivered weakly in the darkness, surrounded by foul smells, and tried to maintain his faith Cy would come to rescue him.
During the night, the plastic bag loosely tied by Cy's mom slowly came open, exposing the top layer of garbage, which included Ry, to slightly fresher air but no light.
Beep! Beep! Ryan also heard the harsh hiss of brakes and a clunky roar of some sort of mechanical engines. A sudden intrusion of bright light occurred when someone lifted the lid on the garbage container. Ryan had only a glimpse of a man's bearded face as he looked into the heap of garbage in the can. The face disappeared and Ryan felt the world overturned as he became an involuntary component of an avalanche of garbage as the man emptied the contents of the container into the back of an enormous truck belonging to the city's sanitation fleet.
The jockstrap fell, helpless to affect its fate in the slightest, being as inanimate as a plastic bottle or an apple core. It could scream, wordlessly, for rescue. The beeping began again as the truck lurched down the street to the next stop. More garbage got added to the truck, burying Ryan the jockstrap ever deeper in the rubbish. Beeping, then more garbage. The process repeated until Ryan had been buried so deeply in the back of the truck that he no longer heard the beeping although his flimsy form could detect the vibrations at the truck traveled along the streets.
Hours later the truck got into line behind a couple of others to dump its load...