‘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
