#fiction/publish | #note/sharing Lon Setnik September 1, 2024 Livingston, Montana Satisfying is the word she would use. Satisfying and accomplished. Her stuff now has the look of being organized, prepared, and ready to move froward. She spent the morning finding the old stuffties that both defined her pre-teens and held her back. Load after load, she carried her things to the garbage out behind the apartment complex, and threw them into the metal opening. There, her memories would tumble down, hit the worn, slanted steel, and scrape over the edge into the darkness. Finally, she hit the compacting lever, and watched the giant piston push the trash into the void. Tomorrow was Tuesday, each Tuesday around 6 am she would hear the beeping of the garbage truck backing up, before it lifted the several-ton container onto its back with two giant bent arms, and finally dumped the combined effluent of the twelve leased one- and two-bedrooms that make up this little complex. It would leave a putrid drip line, and a puff of diesel smoke, as it drove away, leaving an empty, if not clean, bin for them to fill the next week. To be honest, she was both satisfied and angry. Yes, she was cleaning for her own feeling of being caught up, but also to show the space to the next potential tenants. Her dad was moving, and she was going to school, so she needed to cut her possessions. She needed to cut her stuff, probably by 75%. This was going to be hard. The first round had been pretty easy, finding broken, worn, discarded things that were really trash. But, those probably only got her a little bit of the way. She needed to get down to a couple of cardboard boxes for her dad to move, and a trunk and a bag for herself. At her dad's new place, she was only going to have the couch in the living room. With rents going up everywhere, her dad couldn't afford another two bedroom, and she was going to be heading to school. She was going by bus, so couldn't take too much. These thoughts held her attention until she tried to toss the contents of the laundry bin over the side, and the stuffed snake was wrapped around her arm. The snake was 5 feet long, her first real boyfriend, Jaxon, had won it on the ring toss at the Kiwanis Fair when she was twelve. She had sighed when she put it in the laundry bin to carry down to the trash. Oh well, it was moving on that was required, and moving on she was doing. What she didn't understand was, how did it get wrapped around her arm? And why wouldn't it let go? It was dangling over the edge, and didn't have any internal structure. In fact, it's normal position was pulled out straight on the edge of her window sill, since it did a great job blocking the draft in the winter. And here it was, not letting go. She shook her arm a little. She shook her arm a lot. She dropped the laundry bin and used her other hand. As she pealed the tail off from around her bicep, and unwrapped her shoulder, she saw now two wraps on her wrist. With a big move, she shook and unwrapped and flung. It bounced, slid, and disappeared through the square. It landed such that only the tip of it's face was visible, resting on the corner of the square, almost looking straight towards her. She didn't have her glasses on, but it looked like the panda that her dad had given her after his trip to Washington, DC was peaking out. She could clearly see the two black, round ears, and one eye. Hadn't she pushed the compacting lever after her last toss? She turned her back to head up to apartment 6-B, and heard a sliding sound, or a scraping sound. As she looked back over her shoulder, she took one step towards the door, but her feet wouldn't move. Looking down as she fell, she saw the brown furry arms of monkey, hands eternally locked as they always were. Those arms helped her put monkey over a shoulder so it could hug her or a friend. Now they were holding her ankles together, and she tripped. Strangely, it didn't hurt to land. She didn't seem to feel the sharpness of the textured and rustoleum covered black metal that made up the landing. The square of metal that she threw garbage from was and open weave, and convenient for snow and ice. She loved stomping her feet on that landing when she was little; she made giant vibrations, like a gong. But instead of feeling hard teeth hit her legs and chest, she felt a plush cushion, and her vision was blocked by the black and white regular pattern of a panda's chest, it's arms seeming to reach up to receive her.