‘It’s suspicious, isn’t it? Anything that’s free? Is that true, universally speaking, or is it a uniquely American understanding of the volatile lust for profit? We understand the dangers of gasoline, but we still use it to propel our cars. We tell ourselves it is controlled and ignore the occasional fire. The cancers. The damage to climate. Fuel is the way propel our cars and profit is the way we propel our lives and we must accept the inherent dangers if we want to get anywhere at all.

Right?

‘The Pest Depository’ advertises itself as a free service and it is convenient and clean and well-staffed, attributes one might expect a non-profit to have one, maybe two of total. It operates with the sure confidence of a cult, its employees well-dressed and enthusiastic but hardly forthcoming. There is an emphasis on the value of life- of all life. Of the lives of pests.

This seems important.

‘The Pest Depository’ does not catch pests. Its services do not extend beyond their several locations in the state of New Jersey, aside from the occasional pop-up at conventions and fairs. They take only lives pests but they take them all with equal reverence: mice, possums, insects, bats. They have the means of ungluing rodents from traps, but only if they are allowed to keep the result. They claim to set broken bones, though they offer no public menagerie of recovering souls.

They do not, in fact, make any claims about what happens to the ‘pests’ once they have been deposited.

Whatever they do, it must pay the rent.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Taken at face value, ‘Just Table Legs’ goes about its business honestly. The business sells no tables but only their legs, with discounts on matching sets of four or six (but reasonable prices for odd numbers between). They offer custom work for the existing table that needs a leg replaced. The shop reeks of warm sawdust. The owner’s hands are smooth and calloused.

Every chair leg is sold with nails pre-installed, sharp and silver and difficult to transport.

People are found with these nails inside them all the time, the legs swung with such ferocious intent that those pictures of crime scenes that have been made public show the wooden limbs still projecting from the flesh and bone of the victim in whom they have become embedded. 

The owner does not comment on the tendency for his work to be used in murder- only gestures to the sign at the front. 

‘Just Table Legs.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside