
i’m a bounty hunter. it’s an ugly job. it’s not about the carts. the stores don’t want them back, not the carts i’m after. it’s about the commercial war against the homeless.
Your normal carts gone astray are collected by high-school students making minimum wage or fished out of stream beds by canvasing environmental groups.
My targets are the carts filled with a lifetime of belongings, filled with the residue of hard times, the detritus of civilization’s living detritus. Or so the mercantile class around these parts sees it.
When I head under the elevated interstate interchanges into the dark encampments where hundreds of carts are present along with abandoned furniture and discarded building materials and makeshift cardboard-and-blanket tents, i’m descending into a mental underworld,
i used to repossess automobiles but i’m too old for that now.
my focus this year was mary p., who accumulated a collection of carts, filled them, and hid them around the city. i found them one by one and dumped their contents. word on the street was that her distress increased with each loss. word on the street was that she was teetering on the edge of a serious meltdown.
i didn’t stop. i kept finding and dumping her carts.
you know how they say, take a long walk off a short pier. she took a long walk off a pier with no surface remaining on it. i emptied her final cart into the sea.
photo courtesy of Morguefile
for Friday Foto Flash Fiction Challenge
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