The bureau drawers were empty. The
couch was slashed to bits and turned over. The pockets of every shirt, pants
leg, and jacket were over turned. Her purse was cleaned out on the table, as
was his briefcase. Empty jewelry boxes and books were displaced and on the
floor. If someone had come in, someone who did not know what today was and what
it meant, they would think a robbery had taken place.
Today was Wednesday. Judy and Carl
had to find money somewhere to be able to pay for their daughter’s medical
treatments. They were only eighty-seven dollars short. That’s all they needed,
and they couldn’t find any spare change in the house. They had called their friends,
but all of them were either at work and unable to pick up, or didn’t have a nickel
to spare themselves.
This left the couple sitting,
desolate, in the middle of their living room with feathers and shredded fabric
laying about them. Judy was looking off in the distance, as if she were lost in
trance. Carl’s hands were shaking and he felt like a failure. They had been
late with payments, had made deals with banks by taking out mortgages, and had
even taken extra work that left them alien to one another. The only thing
connecting them was a thin strange of silk from their seven year old daughter
in the hospital.
They had twenty minutes to make the
payment for this month. Twenty minutes to get to the bank and transfer the
money before they would have to make a late fee payment. On their way out,
covered in feathers and desperation, they saw a man across the street. He was
tattered and old, smelled like the inside of a trash can, and most likely hadn’t
bathed in months. He was moving a shopping cart filled with old clothes, random
knick-knacks, and bags filled with plastic and aluminum for recycling. He
looked over at them and asked if he could go through their trash to get
anything recyclable, and Carl told him that they had a recycling bin inside the
garage and to help himself. Carl dragged it out himself while Judy sat in the
car and wondered what would happen to her little girl if they weren’t able to
make the payments. Then she stopped thinking about it, she couldn’t.
The tattered man thanked Carl and
gave him one of his knick-knacks, which Carl really didn’t want to take but was
forced to because the tattered man had a crazed look in his eyes. When he got
into the car, Carl gave the knick-knack to Judy and drove towards the bank.
Judy hadn’t been paying attention to what had happened between Carl and the
tattered man, so she opened the knick-knack, which was a gold painted tin, and
gasped. Inside the tin was a pearl necklace and a set of pearl earrings. Judy
forced Carl to drive to the pawn shop and they received more than enough money
to make this month’s payment with four minutes to spare.
When they got back home, the
recycling bin was empty, and a jar was placed on top of it. It had a note taped
onto it, “Charity Accepted.”
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