When felt she had no one, she took a walk and proposed marriage to all the big bulk trash left out on the curb. The biggest discards (desks, coffee tables, couches, night stands) made her feel both sorry and devoted, which was a feelings combo she liked to seek out, as it was as close to a higher self as she could get. Chipped cups, stretchy pants, foodie or nudie mags—the small trash—did nothing for her. Heap it on the mound. But the big bulk trash items were gently hulking zoo animals, once petted, then turned upon. They didn’t bite or maul, they were used as intended, no fault, and it ruined them.
She called these walks her “harsh reality parades,” but only in her diary, which she planned to burn or eat or slip between slight-of-hand magic trick books at the library. For today’s parade, she wore her stomping boots and silently offered her eternal companionship to a floral sofa that was two days wet from recent torrential rains. Maybe a soggy sidewalk couch would truly understand her need to be completely alone and yet constantly adored. And maybe the shadeless floor lamp right beside it would be someone she could lean on. She touched the arm of the sofa (cold, squishy, officially junk) and wondered if these people had even tried posting to a marketplace before letting the weather and the open air ruin their belongings.
Wasteful. Lazy. Abhorrent.
Yet she had technically done the same with the white recliner that had belonged to her mother’s uncle—an ugly inheritance that she kept and used, even though it was not to her taste and even though she didn’t think of herself as someone who needed a lever to help her get horizontal.
One evening she fell asleep in the chair while watching too many episodes of a cooking show. It was the one where the ovens have wheels and can run away and hide, so the contestants have to chase their ovens down while carrying their wet batters and doughs. When she woke up hours later, the ovens were still giving chase and she was sitting in a bloody great lake of her own making. She got up and stared down. She was upset with the stain, felt it was unreasonable. Her period wasn’t due for five days. She shouldn’t have to spray and scrub just because her body couldn’t keep time.
She changed clothes, and then without so much as dabbing at the splot, she pushed and kicked the chair onto the porch, threw it down the front steps, then lugged it lug by lug out to the curb. Out. She knew it would be courteous, even in the dark, to lay a dish towel over the blood, which maybe actually looked like a skydiving starfish, or to turn the cushion over completely. She was feeling bold, though, and wayward, and wanted to let the blood shine and offend. Maybe, she thought, someone would think she’d been stabbed and send over a box of chocolate and an encouraging note about healing.
But in the morning she found that the stain had been gnawed away and torn to fluff. Some animal had smelled blood and gone wild. Probably danced and howled and made teeth sounds. This, for some reason, was too much. This was uncouth and wrong—her blood was not for that kind of taking. She put a black trash bag over the seat of the chair and taped a note to it that said “SOILED,” so no one would try to load it into their pickup and incorporate it into their living room decor.
She felt like explaining all this, about the bloody recliner, to the floral sofa that was maybe a little bit her fiancée. I have a past, she might have told it. One you might not like.
Then a man in a red coat came out of the nearest house and locked his door behind him. As he walked to his car, she asked him about the sofa and the floor lamp, if they were his. She tried not to sound overtly accusatory, but also like she deserved a full explanation. He looked thoughtful, then used his car keys to point at her and the sofa and the lamp. “They were mine a couple days ago,” he said, “but now they are communal.”
She didn’t like the way he used the word communal as a synonym for trashed. She felt this word choice was very bad news for herself and everyone she’d ever tried to love. Still, she waved in a neighborly way when the man with the crushing vocab got into his car.
She couldn’t get the sofa home on her own, plus it was ruined and the florals were sickly and she didn’t want to sit on it now, in health, much less during some future sickness. She waited until the man, the once-owner, drove away, and then to keep some small portion of her vow, she put her mouth to the cushion and sucked out a mouthful of rainwater. She swallowed it, started walking off, then came back for one more swallow in case this garbage rainwater, out of everything she’d tried or meant to try, was the thing that finally made her feel permanent.
