Bailey Davis
The Company of Discarded Things
Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
The day I started working the bins I found a human heart in a jar. At first glance it was an artichoke, then a heart, then an artichoke again. You don’t get used to a shock like that, and you can be sure I haven’t. Once we determined it wasn’t a heart, we shook it hard just to see what it did, and it dissolved into petaled bits. Pickled sludge, something alive kept still. If it had been a heart, I don’t know what I would’ve done. It’s not an easy thing to come by.
I’ve been working at the bins since January, since my boyfriend S left the state. I am pregnant with his child but lying to myself about it. Most of the time I’ve spent sorting donations, deciding what can be sold and what can’t. The objects toe a fine line of continuing to exist. Usually, we don’t let them. I’ve found lots of things while sorting. Lots of things I’d put in my home, and more I wouldn’t touch on the street. More than my share of cleaning the orange or brown or gray liquid that leaks out of the bottom of a bin. I try to guess if it’s Dayquil or barbecue sauce. The second week, I found a pair of real human teeth, stuck in gum-evincing jelly. We accidentally put them out on the floor and only became aware when someone tried to purchase them. My manager Jared hustled out with his pricing gun and spirited them away. After work, a slight censure. He told me the thrift store policies about biotic materials. No exceptions even if we weren’t sure. We hadn’t been sure about the artichoke and look how that had turned out. Anything could be a human body part in disguise. My coworker Lorena and I laughed at him outside on our break. We guessed he was the kind of person who cares earnestly about the rules of a boardgame. She reassured me, offered a Parliament. I declined. It’s good to treat your body like a hotel room every now and then. Restraint makes relish. Later, Lorena got a used needle in her arm lifting a bundle of clothes and left for the day. I found a good amount of snow globes.
For all the things you find sorting the bins, only a few have the capacity to haunt. One of these was a baby photo album I found a few weeks into the job. The baby’s name was Edwin, the year was 1973, and he had a triumphant smudge of hair on his forehead. He was an ugly baby, but they must have loved him. They dated every photo and scribbled short descriptions on the ones that mattered. Edwin’s first word: pear. Edwin’s first trip to the zoo. Edwin, writing his own name. I wondered what it might be like to use the name Edwin, to walk through the world with it. I went to middle school with an Edwin. He was a math teacher’s kid and he once told me he wanted to rip the tattoo sleeve off a female teacher’s arm. In response I said, Don’t you think that’s a bit psychosexual? Then we paused and looked at each other, each realizing we hadn’t meant or understood the words we’d spit out. Wishing to undo such a simple thing as saying. He had the kind of hair you find stuck to a broom. In band, he played the trumpet.
As a child, I hated the secondhand store. I’d slink through the racks when my mom took me along after her shift. I’d sneak looks at shoppers from between sweaters, crouching under the pants rack with tumbleweeds of dust, loose tags, lost lipstick tubes. I would categorize people into shapes: square and oval. Square people moved with urgency. There was a crease between their brows. My mom was a square person, she always had somewhere to be. She took her time hurrying, to really rub it in that she was busy. She’d sit me in the cart and spit on her thumb to wipe an imaginary mark on my cheek. A hypochondriac for all things dirt. She’d mess something to fix it. Oval people, on the other hand, had nowhere to be. They couldn’t get a handle on their sadness. Underwear peeking out of elastic waistbands, barely mismatched socks, cheap plastic shoes. Either way, I didn’t want it.
Lorena is a friend. On break, we provide cautious access to each other’s lives. Lorena has love troubles too. Her son’s dad won’t wise up. She’s part of a Facebook group for West LA women, and the ladies told her to leave him. I told her to leave too, but she didn’t listen when I said it. She showed me the responses she’s gotten: capital letters, emojis, gifs, invocations to not let her crown slip. Lorena’s skin is smooth and foggy, heavily foundationed. Her eyeliner never crumbles at the corners. When we smoke, she sometimes asks about S, says, How’s your guy?
When I told her I took a pregnancy test she didn’t ask what it said. Just gently ashed her cigarette on the railing and said, You’ll be good, girl. No way I’d be good. S hasn’t been answering my calls. He’d turned off his location. Last I’d seen he was in Kansas City. Every so often, there’s a zap in the center of my chest, and I wonder if it means something. Maybe it’s the biotic materials. Maybe just panic. I miss him is the thing. I can tell him what I can’t tell anyone else. I’m afraid of my body cleaving open, and never going back to normal. I’m afraid of the procedure, because this parasite is the last thing I have of his. I think Lorena feels bad for me; our friendship is built on mutual relief. We have found ourselves at the bottom, but at least we are still “I” and not the other. At least I don’t have S’s name in a blown-out heart on my forearm. At least I don’t have photos of my baby wearing the Snapchat dog filter. At least I know how to solve my own problems without asking strangers on Facebook. I don’t know how I provide relief to Lorena, but I can see in her eyes she’s glad not to be carrying my shit. She’s glad to be the kind of person who moves forward. She has no time for shame.
The signs on the donation dumpsters say no underwear, no towels, no blankets, but we get them anyway. You wouldn’t believe the bugs. More bugs than I would’ve thought you could name. All variations of a brown beetle. Some have wings and some don’t. Vibrators too. Some still working. Some sticky, covered in lint. When prodded, they whine and bray like insects.
People like to put things in jars. Pimento olives, garlic cloves bluing in their own brine. Red peppers and green ones and almonds soaked in vinegar. Pasta of various shapes and sizes arranged in glass vases, sealed with a cork and red ribbon. I don’t know where these things come from, just where they end up. I don’t know who would be silly enough to spend money on something like that twice.
Lorena and I talk about mothers. She tells me what it’s like to be one; it’s like being able to see your own soul. She tells it to me like this: now your soul has a digestive tract, and a stomach full of frothy milk, and sometimes hives behind its ears. Your soul has a sea anemone mouth and tiny fingers that make you believe in God. Sometimes your soul gets a fever, and you wonder what would happen if you failed and let the little shell die. Would the soul return to your body? Would it wander unowned like the objects we sort? Lorena tells me about her mother. Her mother lives in El Paso, and they haven’t spoken in three years. Her mother has transferred all the love she used to feel for Lorena into a geriatric Yorkshire terrier, whom she bottle-feeds. Sometimes, Lorena wakes up in the middle of the night to the beginning of a guttural wail. The wail has not yet become sound, and when she peels back the layers to find its source, she discovers that it is hope. Hope that she might receive a call that the Yorkshire terrier has bitten the dust, and that her mother has done some thinking, and would like to meet Lorena’s soul. She doesn’t tell me why they stopped speaking. It’s one of the caution-tape parts of her life, and I do not have access. I don’t have any sections like that. I’d like to tell Lorena everything. I’d like to have my life made simple in her impartial glow.
I keep expecting the thing in my stomach (if there is a thing) to find a way out on its own. I think about waking up in a pool of blood. When I took the test with the [ ] result, I thought to call my mom. I waited a few days. She asked how I’d been, and I told her good, but I realized I couldn’t recall a single lunch I’d eaten in the past year. I couldn’t remember the color of my socks, or when I’d last changed my sheets. I couldn’t remember waking up or going to sleep the night before. I couldn’t remember S leaving, just that he was gone and there was a doneness to it that hadn’t been there last time. He missed his job, driving cross country. He missed his time, and he needed it to think. I didn’t tell her this because she’d want to find a solution and there was none. I didn’t tell her about the bins either. I told her I worked at a vintage store and steamed clothes all day. I told her about the patrons, older women who smelled of palo santo and came in to buy candles and cashmere socks. I told her I had a friendly boss who bought me lunch on Thursdays. I had enough money and never worried about letting the shower warm up before I got in. In the moments that followed these words, I imagined she believed and understood me. That we might agree about something, even just the severity of the air quality or the way to fold napkins (like a fortune cookie). I didn’t apologize for being grown and oval. I didn’t tell her there is a brief but significant moment during fetal development in which the infant body grows gills. I didn’t ask her to name the feeling for watching me grow up and away from her, if it was grief or something duller, a blunt knife pointed outwards. The feeling for longing that does not allow itself to exist. The thing is, she wouldn’t even be upset if she learned about the bins. She’d be satisfied. She’d finally know where to place me. Growing up, the closest she’d hold me was by the elbow. Occasionally, cheek on the roof of my head. She worked in a kitchen, and there was always a peppery smell to her midriff. If she knew all I do is scrape gum off midcentury woodwork and stack sandy old boots, and mop up liquids that are orange or gray, I think she’d tell her book club. She’d be proud I only have 5-7 tattoos. Still, when the phone call ended I hadn’t told her about any of it. The objects that do and don’t haunt, the gray water my hands make at the end of the day. I hadn’t told her about the biotic materials, in my body or anywhere else.
When I sort, I can see shapes in the belongings. The snow globes filled with yellow liquid and dull sequin flakes: oval. Jackets with pockets still full of coins and receipts: square. Sometimes the pockets contain an urgent note like no girl phone line full. Notes like big meeting keep sam down. Notes like gordon in Eunich station. Maybe they meant Union Station? Once, an auspicious-seeming photograph of the moon. I showed Lorena but she didn’t want to touch it. She said the moon could mean too many things. Lots of phone numbers. Lots of 2:00s and 3:00s and 12:00s and 6:30s from gone days. Names that belong in nursing homes.
I’ve only gotten almost-fired once. I didn’t bother to open a jar which contained someone’s mother/daughter/sister. The woman came back frantic an hour later, looking for the body. Lorena and I turned the store over, and when I described the vessel she told me she remembered maybe selling something like that. Inside my gut, the gill-thing pulsed. I remember thinking, I’m baby brained, and I wish I weren’t so stupid. I wished I had something in which to excel. It ended up okay, the purchasing customer came back an hour later holding the jar, now dislodged open to reveal a bag of powder. She was irritated, but it had only floured her back seat lightly when she stopped too fast at a red light. When we called the donor we left out any missing parts, the dusting of kidney or pinkie in a stranger’s back seat. No different than the skin cells we shed every day, really. We’ll have her waiting for you, we said, and she sat tall and aluminum on the edge of the counter. Jared let me off with a warning about conducting thorough intake. Lorena and I went for a cigarette, joking about his sex life, whether he likes his women shaved.
Lorena and her baby daddy are making things work. I told her I was happy for them, but I wanted to scrape a letter gently into her foundation with my keys. Softly, not psychosexual. I had wanted us to make some decision together, although I can’t say what it might have looked like. To forgive ourselves. To mother along without these men. She told me she was quitting the bins soon and that she’d miss me. She got a job at Marshall’s and the benefits were better. I like Lorena because we are friends in that elementary-school-fieldtrip-way: urgently for an afternoon, and then never again.
I joined her Facebook group just to see. Just in case I’m that kind of woman, the one I’ve been all along. I was born as myself and not my mother, or Lorena, or S, because of slight variations in the contraction of the birth canal. Now, all the people not quite like me buy things and bring them home and relinquish them again. They buy furniture with gnawed-up legs, orphaned ceramic mugs, and tennis racquets with a human hand fossiling the grip. They bring me offerings of chipped china, untwinned socks, floss, embossed frames, Fallopian sculptures. We all want the same thing, and it is none of this. In the Facebook group, Lorena’s profile photo was airbrushed and her eyes were big and pink with heart filter. Beautiful; neither square nor oval but another shape entirely.
I guess I’m lucky for the bins, even if it makes me lonely. When Lorena leaves I’ll be on intake by myself. At home only a few things exist: bowls of cereal or reheated rice, unfolded clothes, the smell of myself that lingers for the first five minutes after arriving. S is slipping away the longer he’s gone. I have trouble distinguishing between now and then. I remember a few things. He loves(d) the section of stomach between my belly button and rib. He doesn’t think about things like I do, just does them. He’s square, you know. There is a sprout above his lip, a mole his mother used to call The Crone. He thought she was cruel, but I didn’t think it was that bad. There are worse names, and besides, it was a beautiful mole. I see it everywhere. In baby Edwin’s thumbprint cap. In balls of lint. I wonder if loving someone is just sorting them into smaller and smaller bits until they disappear. All I have of S is The Crone. The shrimp-shaped thing in my belly. I love him, foolish. In the half-dark of a homewares mirror, I can see my own gills have grown in. The mirror is generous, and the dark too. I could call my mom and tell her I’ve learned. Tell her about the artichoke heart. The jar. The company of discarded things. I could ask to come home. The three of us could live tucked inside each other like a matryoshka; she, I, and the baby which does not yet exist. I could wash my sheets. I could stop waiting for S, for whom I have stilled into a photograph. I wonder if he keeps it folded up in his wallet to look at on long nights. To miss me or punish himself. I can picture my mom saying, You’ll be good, putting my worry in a subthermal box. I cannot picture her saying, You’ll be good, girl. I cannot picture being good. When Jared says I’m good to go for the night, sometimes I have a few extra coins, a few lighters tucked in my jacket. I leave smelling like other people’s houses, other people’s pockets. On occasion, a photo of someone else’s baby in mine.
Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her writing contends with themes of obsession, absurdity, and the layered complexities of mental illness. She has appeared in the Bombay Literary Magazine, Hobart, and the Dunce Codex literary anthology. Her work has been recognized by the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and she was named a finalist in the 2024 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and the 2025 BOMB Fiction Contest.