From the top antenna of a building eighty feet closer to space than Miles Goodman, now wincing at the feeling of his stepmother’s bird-like clutch around his hand, came a triangular portion of a supermarket sticker, initially pressed to the skin of a dry orange. With the harsh wind, the sticker blew down and dropped onto the sleeve of Miles Goodman’s jacket. Miles did not notice the piece at all — it just fell boringly and went unnoticed by all of the intelligent beings that zigzagged — no larger than ants and not knowing “where next.” Boot-cut jeans served the seemingly unimportant purpose of slushing into the oily slick of the rain puddle where the sticker piece nestled, and even though it had lost nearly all of its adhesive properties, it was mucked onto the pants of a lazy boy for the remainder of the month of January, which would expire in thirteen long hours. It wasn’t until after midnight next February when Grace Riley picked at the mud-caked piece with her fingernail. After the lazy boy had fallen asleep and after the sex that was mostly okay, she rolled it up into a brown and white cigar-shaped little thing — bulbous in the middle and to a sharper point on each end. With a sigh, the altered fraction of the piece was tossed by Grace into the garbage can beside her — overflowing with cream-caked tissues and rotten cores of the much-needed fruit that the lazy boy tried to eat as much as he could. So even though the piece, after having been rolled so thin and so tight by this point, was so small at that moment — it still remained. The garbage acted as a brace on which the piece perched, untouched until the following March when the lazy boy finally emptied his trash into a larger black bag, which did not actually get taken outside and tossed into the appropriate truck until the following April. Far down in the randomly assigned garbage bag, to the left and now even smaller than the mini-cigar that Grace had rolled it into, the remainder of the piece nestled in an empty plastic container that once held mediocre microwavable soup. The piece smelled rotten now like garbage but this was not its fault — as the bag ripped and crushed under the wrath of the back-of-the-truck machinery, it still lingered in its new home — the soup cup — or rather just a portion of the cup. A rough oval and jagged — the cup had caught the rest of the sticker piece. Saved by Grace or by the sleeping boy’s unwillingness to hem his pants or by Miles Goodman. Saved by the bored office employee who ate his lunch on the roof and the wind that tossed it from place. The oval-shaped piece of the soup cup had been pushed out of a heap at the city dump and out of its place when a Dumpster diver spotted an old broom and was disappointed upon realizing that the broom had no bristles left and that it smelled like death. The new piece trickled down the pile of refuse like a pebble free from a hill of bigger rocks where it had once belonged and had stayed belonging for nearly a century. Two days later, the new piece stuck to the tongue of a stray dog sniffing for discarded treats — another new home that may as well not exist at all, but still — still pasted — fused to another matter.
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